First, everybody show know about what my friend Anthony is doing with found car parts. His work makes our use of that much-loved upcycle term we like to throw around seem really not quite all it could be. I like the word of Re-Make. Or maybe with have to go with Calvin's Transmogrify.
I'm thinking about him in part today because I'm still chewing on that
How do you have time for that? question that I was kicking around last week--and that some of you were bitchin enough to kick around with me--and I see Anthony and his family living the Making Life that I keep talking about. Being near them this year has cheered me on to keep at my own Making. And we've had some great conversations about what art is supposed to do. What it's
for.
So, I'm going to live on the edge and offer up a piece I wrote a few years ago about the poetry writing that I've done for many years. I'm just going to paste in the big fat document. And if you don't write poems but you do make quilts or tote bags or re-make old shirts into new dresses or like to glue bottle tops to things or find yourself carving wood or building renaissance palaces out of sand or knitting things with tiny thread, then you get this question too. Just substitute your own Making for the word poetry. Here it is . . .
What Is Poetry For?
About ten years ago I went unsuspectingly to my mailbox and
found an acceptance letter for my first published poem with a check for $50
dollars--and, in the same stack, a letter from the IRS telling me I owed
$500 dollars in back taxes. (What, exactly, they thought they were taxing is
still a mystery to me, as I was a two-part-time job/living-on-student-loans
graduate student at the time.) Questions of taxability aside, this was the
moment I first asked the question: “What is poetry for?”
Stay with me. I’m about to talk about something you think
you know about completely. I’m thinking of the Inuit people—all of their 7
gajillion words for ice. A well-studied linguist will tell you that all those
words are a true proof of the ever-changing, always-adapting nature of
language.
I say that’s not all. I say those really not 7 gajillion but
200 words for ice (or 15 if you’re some guy from the University of Texas—but 15
is still more than we’ve got and if you ask me the guy is a linguistic
pessimist). I say all those words are the proof of the thing that drives the
poet--Saying.
I don’t marvel that Eskimos had lots to say about ice. I do
marvel that they kept trying to say and didn’t stop after ten or 12 words. They
kept saying: ice that’s melted, ice that’s melted and refrozen, slippery ice,
stinging ice, slushy ice, powdery ice, squared ice, ice with flavoring, the shiny thing about ice that makes
you squint, the hot-coldness of ice on your tongue. They just kept at it
because there was so much to say about ice. That passel of words is a tribute
to Saying.
And more than an indicator of how much there was to
say (because they could compound the pieces of their language in a way that
English doesn’t let us, so they could describe intricate differences with a
single—maybe really long, but still single, word) those 15 essences or roots of
that one word ice that turned themselves into those 200 words make me think
they wanted to keep saying. They wanted to keep saying about
something that was in front of them in every direction they looked—under their
feet, out along the horizon, over their sheltered heads at night , in their
tea, between their toes if they weren’t so lucky, somewhere a couple of layers
of warm fur down below their backs as they slept—all around.
I’m no linguist, but I say they kept talking about ice
because it kept being around.
I know how they felt. I’m looking under my feet, out along
the horizon, over my head at night, in my tea, between my toes, below my back
as I sleep—and I’m saying. I’m just going to keep saying. Because the ice of my
life just won’t melt. So I have to keep saying.
I hear the voice of my writer friends in my ear as I write:
“Are you saying that the end-quality of the poem is only a secondary
consideration to the poet’s experience of writing it?—that a bad poem is as
good as a good poem?
Well, of course I’m not saying that. I keep working to write
good poems so that I believe them myself. Saying is only as good as it is
believable. When I say my life, I hear my life; when I hear my life, I start to
believe that it’s all real.
And that’s what poetry is for, if you ask me. Not the said—the Saying.
