Finding poetry where ye may

I

Poets are sometimes asked silly questions. "When did you first know you were a poet?" and "Who is your favorite poet?' are in this category. If you are a true lover of the word, a seeker of truths, and a game-player in the spinning world of the imagination, such questions cause consternation. So many favorites. . . so many moments . . . poets deal with the excesses of the mind, rather than its limits.

But I have fabricated answers to satisfy myself, and to explain something of a poet's origins. As for many, my awareness that language can do other than report false facts, express ignorance, and cause emotional harm, took hold in rock n'roll and for that I will always be grateful to my brother. At age 12, I was listening to the Monkees and the soundtrack of "The Sound of Music" and at 13, Wayne gave me a pair of record albums: "Surrealistic Pillow" by the Jefferson Airplane and "The Doors." Marty Balin, Grace Slick and Jim Morrison grabbed my figurative cojones and never let me go.

"Today" and "Light My Fire," "White Rabbit" and "The End" articulated the longing of the heart and the danger of sexuality, and expressed a (my) need to escape from culturally agreed-upon reality: "the world of getting and spending." From "the hills are alive" and "I am sixteen going on seventeen," I jumped into "do away with people wasting your time" and "the crystal ship is being filled, a thousand girls, a thousand thrills."

This was stuff I had to hide, not so much for my shame but for the fact I didn't want my mother worrying about what her daughter had gotten into; something in me was ready for headier stuff, the witches' brew. I had entered a place where language evoked so much more than negotiations about time and money, and whether or not daddy would come home drunk today . . . what was it, exactly? A place of bristling but honest anger outspoken, awareness of mortality, energy released in love and the complications of love's affairs, revelations, exoticism, God and Satan, eroticism, flashes of color and incongruent imagery.

My favorite poets take emotional risks. Paul Celan--whose work I can barely understand--wows me with its Germanic noun-compounds and imagery juxtapositions as did his mentor Emily Dickinson (he translated her poems into German); I love Rilke and the Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos (both knew what had to be sacrificed in order to give over to their art); I love the Greek doctor Yannis Ritsos, imprisoned on an island, and the Argentinian philosopher poet Roberto Juarroz. Revisiting Edna St. Vincent Millay, I am moved by her searching sorrows and abiding heart; there are brilliant eastern European poets and African poets who explore where language hurts because it is all too often the language of their conquerors.  I love Wang Wei, in his own culture an outcast, and the eternity of William Shakespeare. I will never fathom the Psalms and love them for their passion and earthiness.

For contemporary poets, I blow the trumpet for Stephen Dobyns whose outlandish imagination and philosophical excursions always delight me. I love Marilyn Nelson Waniek, Louise Gluck's "The Blue Iris," Carolyn Forche's "The Angel of History," Langston Hughes, Nina Cassian, the Israel poet Zelda (translated by local poet Marcia Falk), and have found some of the best poems ever in two great anthologies: Jerome Rothenberg's  "Technicians of the Sacred" and Forche's "Against Forgetting."

There is a poet to touch the soul of everyone. Because it is something of a lost art--in the sense that there is practically no coverage of it in mass media (with the fine exception of the "News Hour" which covers poets using funds from the McDonald's legacy), the average Joe is often excluded from the conversations between poets.

I try to give books by contemporary poets to friends who say they do not understand poetry, and as a teacher I suggest people send their poems--not to the best-known literary journals--but to their trade organization newspapers, their church or synagogue newsletters, or self-publish it rather than wait for the overwhelmed and very subjective iterary publishers.

Find poetry and move poetry beyond the domains of graduate students (who are often the first readers of those few literary journals). Poetry needs to  breathe. Rock and roll did it for me, then folk music, then William Blake, Shelley, and Baudelaire. Kind of like how marijuana can lead to the harder stuff. If you are lucky, it will.