I was invited recently by The Poetry Society of New Hampshire to read poems from my new book, Adrift. To give the reading an anchor, I agreed to connect the book’s loose theme of adrift-ness to notion of people finding ways to reconnect post-pandemic through poetry.
I would have been fine just reading any of my poems and letting people think what they will, but in retrospect I’m glad we did this exercise. Thinking about the theme has helped me think a bit more about how the past few wearying years — along with the too-real prospects of greater human havoc to come — have impacted my writing, as well as my reading of other poets. And it has given me this opportunity to reflect on the link between poetry and the kind of spiritual and moral connection I think we need in order to fuel hope in a time when hope is in short supply.
I was in Ireland recently — a trip, speaking of connecting, that included a visit to my grandfather’s childhood village — and on a sign in front of a shop in the western Ireland was this William Butler Yeats quote:
“The world is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our senses to get sharper.”
I searched the internet and my collection of Yeats’ poems for the source of this quote, but with no luck. Perhaps it’s not a Yeats’ quote after all, but one of those things that gets spread around the internet anyway. (If you know the source, please let me know; in truth, I don’t think it sounds like the kind of thing Yeats would write, at least not in a poem.) Whether this quote is Yeats’ or not, I found myself responding with a nod of understanding. I think it’s fair to say that the isolation and loss we’ve experienced during the pandemic, followed by the shocking affront of would-be tyrants in the political sphere, and the increasingly clear, and further shocking, knowledge of the damage we have done and continue to do to the natural world, has forced on us — or most of us, anyway — a different view of the world along with the need to find new ways forward, individually and collectively. For me, at least, everything feels more fragile and confusing and challenging. Maybe life has always been like this and I’ve just haven’t been fully attuned. But of late I’ve experienced moments of real rage and frustration — and have also occasionally slipped into a kind of post-rage emptiness. Like the folks in the London Underground in Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” I’ve been “distracted from distraction by distraction.” And I’m trying to understand what this means for the days ahead.
And I know I’m not alone in feeling more adrift and uncertain about where we are going and what we are collectively doing. That look of adrift-ness is easy to spot in others.
I think some drifting in life is essential. It’s a kind of time out from all the striving. A chance to regroup. But it’s a dangers place to settle for long because it leads to a kind of resignation. Knowing this, I try to countering the adrift-ness as best I can by focusing on understand these feelings, on the one hand, and on letting the world reveal more of itself, on the other. I’ve been both exploring what it feels like to be adrift and thinking about how adrift-ness informs, or can inform, my understanding of the natural and human world — and of art. In this way, I find myself aiming for deeper attentiveness of late — trying to sharpen my senses, as Yeats’ suggests. The underlying question for me is: How should one respond to to our fractured society and our world-damaging behavior?
Of course, implied here is the question of how, as a poet, I can and should respond? What is art’s role here?
Many of the poems in my book were written before the pandemic. But putting the manuscript together during the pandemic influenced its shape, and probably some of the editing to follow — including pulling out of some poems and inserting newer ones that felt more thematic.
For me, I’ve come to realize, this adrift feeling has been about various forms of separation — from nature, from family roots and loved ones, from my younger self/former life, and from a society that itself is seriously adrift. Perhaps most troubling has been separation from my younger self’s unshakable sense of hope for the world — and from what I once thought of as my worldview.
This is big stuff piled on big stuff and can easily knock one off kilter. The voice in my head tries to right the ship by saying, Don’t be a hopeless idiot, dummy. But it takes a while to come around. My more useful response has been to push for greater awareness — to pay deeper attention to the natural world and to what I think truly matters in this complex thing we call human society. The adrift-ness, in other words, has encouraged what Carolyn Forché calls “the poetry of witness.”
When one travels to Ireland, one quickly becomes aware that it’s an such an inviting place to be. Yet one is also aware that Ireland is a nation with a complex and shocking history. The signs are everywhere; and as I traveled throughout both Dublin and County Kerry, I found myself thinking about just how cornered and desperate the Irish were under 300 years of English suppression. At the same time, I couldn’t really imagine how it felt to be living in such squalor and then, while already hanging onto the last threads of the proverbial rope, to enter a famine of shocking proportions that roiled on for a number years without relief. In the mid-19th century, the average Irish person traveled only within short distances of their home. But the Great Famine, if it didn’t kill them outright, suddenly forced so many Irish out into the world with a small bag of possessions and the wish to survive. So many of those who didn’t flee, died. So many who fled also died of disease on diseased-riddled ships. But many, including my grandparents, also made it to a new country and new opportunity. I imagine they experienced adrift-ness is a big way — literally and figuratively. Separated from all they knew and loved, they had to build new lives in new communities that didn’t want them and that treated them with disdain. They had to do all this while speaking the language of their centuries-long oppressors. Of course, this story has been matched in so many other nations over the years and continues to play itself out today — especially as the effects of global warming start to kick into gear.
Given my Irish roots, I also thought a lot about contemporary Ireland and its continuing efforts to fight its way to independence and then to find its identity as a young nation in a quickly globalizing society. Fintan O’Toole’s excellent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves, explores the question of modern Irish identity. For the Irish, there’s so much to collectively wrestle with these days, with the essential question being: How does a country that initially prided itself on being rural, Catholic, and independent — only to learn that these three elements would not, could not, lead to a flourishing nation — find its way forward?
It occurred to me that the question of “finding one’s way” is the question we’re all facing as individuals and citizens of every nation now. For all of us, of course, there are other forces beyond the personal that are driving feelings of adrift-ness. My list includes the obvious issues: global warming and our tepid response to date; political unrest and divide led by a plethora of politicians backed by people with enormous wealth who seem determined to erode our democracy (or maybe squash the whole concept of democracy) for personal power; the rise of AI and the growing sense that, increasingly, we are serving our machines; population growth and the pressures on resources; and the ongoing, dispiriting loss of biodiversity. But it also includes more generally that sense of the loss of what writer and activist bell hooks calls “the beloved community.”
In a recent interview for the American Academy of Poets,” Carolyn Forché said about poets working today that “…what we share in common is a sense of urgency regarding all that is at stake and under threat: the survival of our democracy, our humanity, our living Earth.”
I know this fight isn’t the sole focus of poets — or that poets are the only ones who take these challenges seriously. I also know that this is not the only preoccupation of poets. But most of the poets I know do feel a sense of urgency about the role of poetry in addressing or highlighting or exploring the dimensions of these essential life matters. As for me, I’m trying to understand our collect human problems as best I can so that I can help contribute to a more humane response. As a poet, I want to spotlight what I think of as deeper truths —ones that I feel I’m seeing, or sensing, or approaching through greater attentiveness to the natural world, to the best of our literature past and present, to the revelations of the environmental science community, to the philosophers and theologists who have examined human nature from every angle to understand our drive and motivation, our gifts and shortcomings, our love and our hatred, etc. What can I create in response? How do I further the artistic conversations that date back to Homer and are threaded through Danté and Shakespeare and continue to blossom in the beautiful, varied, modern world of poetry?
Writing aside, I also find myself simply longing to learn more about the magic of the world — for the joy it brings, for the wonder it inspires, for the spiritual infusion it offers. I love discovering, for instance, that the largest living organism on earth is a fungi network in Oregon that weighs hundreds of tons and covers ten square kilometers and is between two and eight thousand years old. Or learning that dogs actually do see in color (but not the colors we see). Or that there are more bacteria in your gut than stars in the galaxy. Or that low-frequency whales songs can be heard across oceans. Or that spiders can tune their webs to various frequencies to attract specific insects. You know… the magical stuff. As I write in one of my poems, this sort of knowledge “starts some kind of solifluction of the soul.”
The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel says, “Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be experienced.”
I do wish for humanity to buck up and behave better — and I have to believe we can — but I’m also onboard with this notion of just letting the non-human world in more, for the magic it offers and for the humility it inspires.
Jay Parini, in his book Why Poetry Matters, says that poetry is about seeking out patterns, scouring the dark, in order to discover the chinks in time that reveal the light. He also writes, “The poet is always a guest a great feast.”
In addition to attentiveness to the world is the matter of attentiveness to poetry and poetic forms — to the craft. As the late Mary Oliver says, “A poem that is composed without the sweet and correct formalities of language, which are what sets it apart from the dailiness of ordinary language, is doomed. It will not fly.”
We really really really need our poems to fly today. I guess that’s essentially what I’m thinking. In some cases, this means following in the fat footsteps of Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot. In other cases, it means finding that joyful, engaging structure of a Billy Collins or Wisława Szymborska poem. In some case, it means taking up Carolyn Forché’s call for poetry of witness. We filter all this art and craft and experience and insight as we aim to build our own structures, our own poetic purpose.
I want to add one more observation from my recent visit to Ireland. With all the collective suffering over three hundred years or more, there has also been some amazing art — including astounding poetry and music — in response. This is what artists and writers do. We bear witness to the world as it is. We don’t (can’t, really) offer solutions. We don’t tell people how to think or live. But we do hope that our art will help lead to a heightened sense of life, a better understanding of the world, a more humane humanity — and, if we’re lucky, to a more just, peaceful, and verdant world.
Irish writer Oscar Wilde says, “Poets are always ahead of science. All of the great discoveries have been stated before in poems.” This is a bit hyperbolic, but it’s true that poets and artists can and do help lead the way, can and do drive change.
Wilde also says, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist. That is all.”
I write because I’d like to see more of us join that rare group of people aiming to truly live. We acknowledge the suffering — ours and others — but we find a way through to spotlight core matters of importance, including the beauty and magic.
Danté, at the end of The Divine Comedy, puts it this way:
The will roll’d onward, like a wheel
in even motion, by the love impell’d
that moves the sun in Heav’n and all the stars.
.