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

IV

CONCLUSION: ART AS PROTEST

What I hope I have shown is a way to read both prose and poetry—one way, not the only way—but for me a way that links all genres by looking at how language evolves in a work. For me it creates a journey towards what Zajc called at the beginning if this essay,  personal land beyond the reach of the stalkers. Rilke once wrote “poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences.” It is that experience that the texts I have chosen, working by evolving, metamorphosing, references in language, visual images or allegorical counterpoint, create sub stories that themselves create a world beyond the surface world of the text, and experience that acts on us in ways that are pretty much subliminal. As Wallace Stevens once wrote in “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts’—The whole of the wideness of the night is for you, / A self that touches all edges, // You become a self that fills the four corners of the night.”

Our work is to make art, to use language to create structure and order in the face of chaos and confusion, honesty in the face of deception, spirit in the face of materialism. I think of the forward to Zane Grey’s western novel, To The Last Man:

In this materialistic age, this hard, practical, swift, greedy age of realism, it seems there is no place for writers of romance itself. For many years all the events leading up to the great war were realistic, and the war itself was horribly realistic, and the aftermath is likewise. Romance is only another name for idealism, and I contend that life without ideals is not worth living. Never in the history of the world were ideals needed so terribly as now…. People live for the dream their hearts. And I have yet to know anyone who has not some secret dream, some hope, however dim, some storied wall to look at in the dusk, some painted window leading to the soul.

And I would add that it is our duty as writers to look through that painted window to the soul by writing what is true to our hearts, in a language that is carefully constructed, that remakes the language of what I referred to at the beginning as “the stalkers.” It means a careful attention to language itself as a kind of story within a text, to artistry, to interconnections in language which is also an interconnection with each other.  It means you must tell your own personal story of your own personal land in a way that combats the chaos around you, that cannot be shattered by the stalkers. To return to Audre Lorde with which I began—“poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

I think of the end of Barbara Hurd’s book, The Epilogues: Afterwards on the Planet: “Generosity. Compassion. … If there’s anything redemptive about what’s likely to happen, perhaps it’s in our learning to grieve in the gritty chaos together. To fashion new stories not of action but of intermingled attentions.” Poetry is always an invitation as Frost beckoned us “You come too.”

It is what Adam Zagajewski is getting at in his poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” which is what I would like to end with. Here, the repeated motive which echoes throughout the poem, becoming more insistent, is the directive addressed to “you”—