Prose for Poets, Poetry for Prose Writers: How I Read and Write in Troubled Times

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PREAMBLE: TRUTH AND BEAUTY

The poet Audre Lorde once wrote: “Poetry is an absolute necessity of our living because it delineates… it the beginning of that process by which we insure the future because we know so much more than we understand. We must first examine our feelings for questions, because all the rest has been programmed. We have been taught how to understand, and in terms that will insure not creativity, but the status quo. If we are looking for something which is new and something which is vital, we must look first into the chaos within ourselves. That will help us in the directions that we need to go—that’s why our poetry is so essential, is so vital. Now whether poetry has the responsibility to effect social change… it doesn’t really matter. As we get in touch with the things that we feel are intolerable, in our lives, they become more and more intolerable. If we just once dealt with how much we hate most of what we do, there would be no holding us back from changing it.”

I think what is so crucial here is that, for the writer, to effect change does not necessarily mean to write something with overtly political or social content. Poetry brings order to chaos, thought to thoughtlessness, a sympathetic imagination, in Keats’ sense, to todays’ dispassionate politics.  For him and for any writer, “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” As William Carlos Williams wrote in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” I am thinking also of James Balwin’s 1979 interview. “The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world…. What I hope to convey? Well, joy, love, the passion to feel how our choices affect the world… that’s all.”