Sherry Chandler

Truth

From 37 Days via Blue Girl, Red State:

Sometimes it is hard to name our own truth, to speak it. And in those times, we turn to poets. As if they alone have captured the true function of art–to provide us metaphors that make deep truths of life bearable, knowable, speakable.

Walking with my friend Kichom once as we crossed campus to the first meeting of a class we would teach together, he ran straight into a plate glass window, like a bird hitting a sliding glass door, not realizing it was there. It startled us both, warped his glasses a bit, he hit it so hard. I turned to him and said the first thing that came to mind: “Everything is a metaphor, Kichom.” We laughed a big, bent-over-double-at-the-waist laugh. “Yes, yes, I can see that,” came his beautiful answer, which made us laugh even more.

From Naomi Nye:

A little girl said to me, last year, “Poetry has been eating all my problems.” And I said, “What do you mean by that?” And she said, “It just makes me feel better when I read it, or when I write it.” And I think that’s been true for many people in this country.

From Alexei Tsvetkov, Leaving Prague: A Notebook in Poetry (February 2008):

Actually, I do have some thoughts about why I returned to poetry.

I had wondered what it was good for. Orpheus, based on his experience as a zookeeper, might have disagreed with Auden about it making nothing happen. Brodsky was fond of quoting that famous bit of Auden, yet in his Nobel lecture he spoke of the purportedly pacifying qualities of  Dickens, which may be related to the poems by Orpheus that charmed wild beasts: “for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens.” I wonder if  he ever read Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.

Poetry definitely used to make things happen. Homer, whoever he was, probably sang in the twilight of the Heroic Age, but the tributaries of that river flow from a time when poetic bloodshed directly stimulated the real one. The Vikings used their skalds in a similar way. It wasn’t always a bad thing: there are many examples of other noble passions benefiting from poetry. Still, the noblest of all was courage, and the best display of that was dispatching an enemy to Valhalla.

The Romantic era was, to an extent, a remake of the Heroic Age, minus most of the bloodshed. People raved about poetry. We cannot exactly pinpoint what it was that Lord Byron changed in the world, but it was plenty. Longfellow, traveling abroad, was recognized by people in the street. Teddy Roosevelt knew “Evangeline” by heart.

Poetry is apparently an emotional amplifier, one that is almost neutral, morally. In fact, it flourished in times that few of us would like to see repeated. Still, many of the best poets have tamed it in the manner of Orpheus, and it appears to have lost much of its force together with its menace. Hence Auden’s observation — as well as Brodsky’s halfhearted rebellion.

Is any of this relevant to my current situation? I don’t think so, and in fact I’d be the last person to inspire valor in the troops. When I abandoned poetry, I went on to dabble in various other genres hoping I’d get closer to the truth. Well, I didn’t, of course, the truth remaining as distant as ever. But I have now rediscovered what poetry is good for. It is the only way I know how not to lie — provided, that is, I stay far enough away from the halls of  heroes.

Such statements equating poetry with truth and consolation are great for puffing up a poet’s ego, though I’m not sure they do much to persuade the great unwashed that poets are their unsung holy ones.

My own truth is that belief in such statements kept me for many years from writing such poetry as I am able to write because I felt myself somehow unworthy.

I know that I know no truth. All I have is a craftswoman’s appreciation for language.

I can come closer, perhaps, to feeling that I can at least aspire to David Kirsch’s notion of poetic truth, The Taste of Silence, in Poetry (January 2008):

…in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” {Heidegger] issues a particular invitation to poets, arguing that poetry is in some way the model for all other art forms, and the exemplary activity of human beings. The poet, he writes, “uses the word—not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word.” Like Emerson, that is, Heidegger regards poetry as the truest form of language, and most language as merely defective poetry. “The nature of poetry,” he goes so far as to declare, “is the founding of truth.”

…

This poetry—our poetry—prefers to imagine the artist not as a creator, but as a witness. It has a strong sense of ethical obligation, holding that the poet must serve as a bearer of memories and perceptions that history would otherwise sweep away. Whenever a poet is concerned with giving things their proper names, or with remembering what everyone else forgets, or with seeing nature so intently that it seems to yield up secrets, he or she is practicing this sort of Heideggerian poetry.

To pull quotes in this way is very much to oversimplify a lovely and sophisticated argument. I strongly suggest that you read the whole thing.

My point is only to say this: what a poet does is remind us that, as Kirsch reminds us and as Heidegger stated in “The Origin of the Work of Art,”

At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary.

Possibly related posts:

Truth, Balance and the News

A World of Difference

An Inconvenient Truth

On the inadequacy of being accurate

The unvarnished truth about noodling

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