Poetry Is Not a Luxury

Words for survival

I can’t remember the first poem I read, but I can remember the first one that moved me. My high school English teacher read Mary Oliver’s “The World I Live In” by a campfire along the Salmon River in Idaho. I was 17. Until that point, to me, poetry was rooted in academia, and dulled by its structure. I studied Poe, Shakespeare, Frost. I memorised a Robert Creeley poem, “For Love”, for a spoken word contest. I didn’t understand it then, and I still don’t really understand it now. That’s probably why I lost. I spent collective hours agonising over rhyme scheme and meter and examples of onomatopoeia and apostrophe, but nothing ever penetrated beyond the surface of my student shell. I had to be isolated from everything, from the possibility of a good grade or recognition, to hear a poem as it was. I looked up at the stars and listened, and the words reached into my chest and squeezed my heart.

Here’s “The World I Live In”:

I have refused to live 
locked in the orderly house of 
reasons and proofs. 
The world I live in and believe in 
is wider than that. And anyway, 
what's wrong with Maybe? 

You wouldn't believe what once or 
twice I have seen. I'll just 
tell you this: 
only if there are angels in your head will you 
ever, possibly, see one. 

I wrote the line what’s wrong with Maybe? in my journal the night I heard it. There was something about the isolation of nature that allowed me to reflect on it more than I would have normally. A poem in a classroom bounced off of the rest of my chaotic life, fell to the bottom of my backpack among other loose papers and notes, and my mind was too clouded to properly soak it in. But it was July, before my senior year, and my parents were 2,000 miles away. Summer work and college talk could wait — the only thing that was important at that moment was that poem and the explosion of stars above me. Sometimes it seems like the things that are most important to you come in times of quiet. I think it was a timely listen — among all the stress of school and careers and friends, hearing what’s wrong with Maybe? was an eye-opener. Yes, how big the world is, and how important words are to remind us.

by Erika Lee Sears

I didn’t revisit poetry until my Freshman year of college. I bought Mary Oliver’s Felicity, the book in which “The World I Live In” appears. I flipped through it here and there, but it wasn’t until I was left isolated again that I understood its impact, and the impact of poetry in general. I spent most of 2020 and 2021 quarantining at home in Virginia with my family. My mom works in healthcare and continued to go to work. My dad worked from home, and my sisters studied online. As for me, the entire rest of my first year of university was cancelled. I had nothing to do — save for the old barista job that I took to fill up my time. We closed the café for two weeks on April 1st, and on April 3rd I read “The Orange” and posted it to my Instagram. I loved it for its simplicity, and the way it helped me recognise the beauty of things that already existed in my life. At that time, it was the biggest comfort. But it was only in the quiet that I listened. The poem spoke to me, and a far-away self spoke back to me in between the lines.

Jeanette Winterson describes poetry as a place to locate feelings: “not a hiding place, but a finding place”. Reading a poem is a form of self-intimacy. Sometimes it feels like looking into a mirror, other times it feels like finding something new behind a thick fog. I guess for me it just illuminated my life, and helped me practice holding it. Big events in our lives are often rendered and seen as individual phases — poetry allows you to look into the in-betweens, to magnify the seams that have stitched us together. It allows an acceptance of the unknown, a curiosity for what’s to come and often a hope that something good will. It shouldn’t be something that’s deemed high-class or exclusively academic; the truth is, the majority of poets are just average humans. Even in their un-average successes, they often deepen human experiences, like peeling an orange. I am coming to a final understanding of something I was told for years but never truly believed: my life will most likely be very ordinary. That doesn’t mean it won’t be beautiful.

I spent a long time chasing an extraordinary life: I wanted to read the classics, make friends with the popular kids, build a big social media following, live in Paris. Recently I submitted an essay to The New York Times and daydreamed about where an acceptance would take me I was sent back a rejection, one of many in an ongoing streak. It was proof that I didn’t stand out, that I wasn’t special — it upsetted me because I wanted proof that I was. I wanted to see something great happen to me so that I’ll become something great as a result. This belief is often contradicted with my experience with poetry. Life is fundamentally a balance between bearing witness and being witnessed, and it is the former that poetry reinforces. It’s made me believe parts of my life are indeed special, like my relationship with my best friend, or dancing in the basement with my family, or that time a stranger found my backpack on a train and returned it. It enhances the ordinary, so that when I tilt my head a certain way in a certain light, my entire life sparkles. For two years, I had to tilt and squint and look into crevices and cracks. As I did, in my head echoed the whisperings of Mary Oliver, Wendy Cope, Ross Gay, Linda Gregg, Ada Limón. They kept me moving, looking for the light. Poetry is survival — the proof and encouragement of it.

Mark Strand’s “My Name:

Once when the lawn was a golden green 
and the marbled moonlit tree rose like fresh memorials 
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed 
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass, 
feeling the great distances open above me, and 
wondered 
what I would become and where I would find myself, 
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant 
that the vast star-clusttered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way 
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off 
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go. 

Denise Levertov wrote that “the purpose of poetry is to awaken sleepers by means other than shock”. Sometimes I feel like a poem, like Strand’s, plunges me into existence. The words are all ordinary, simple, accessible, yet when stitched together they provide a lens of awe, wonder, and tenderness. Mary Oliver famously said that poetry “musn’t be fancy”. I really believe that the people who can benefit the most from poems aren’t those living in an elite intellectual society, but rather the average person: The office worker having lunch in the grass, the lonely suburbanite on a walk to the mailbox, the city-dweller waiting for the bus. Look up for a moment, pay attention, and listen to the silence.

Perhaps the most important work on this topic is Audre Lorde’s 1977 essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury”, which praises the vitality of feeling in a world that emphasises fear:

For within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were meant to kneel to thought as we were meant to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They lie in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.

Recently I have been thinking a lot about AI and what its development means for me as a writer. Where does my responsibility lie? How can I embrace and emphasise humanity in a time when it is being so subtly rejected? There is a necessary and anchored authenticity in poetry that machines can’t replicate without a lived knowledge of reality. The emergence of this particular discussion has only made me further understand the value of my body, and work a little harder to be aware of the little things that make being alive so wonderful: the sun on my face, a cup of tea, a hug against a warm body.

Audre Lorde concludes:

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt — of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead — while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.

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I wrote my dissertation last year on the healing power of poetry, and will be going back to school in late 2024 to further my studies. Simple and accessible contemporary poetry has a strong place in academia that’s yet to be filled — particularly in middle and high schools. It’s not meant to confuse or drive away. It’s a reflection of humanity, and encourages us to be patient and attentive to ourselves and the world around us.

This week marks the start of National Poetry Month. In case you missed it, I’m sending a poem out every day in April to celebrate. Opt in here :-)

Thank you for reading Devotions. I love finding and sharing these poems, and I hope you’ve found one or two that you can carry in your heart in the quiet moments.

<3

Tara