Staying Human: Read (and maybe write) Poetry

This is the first of what will be an ongoing series on what it means to stay human in these dehumanizing times.

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How can an act like reading poetry help us to stay human these days? Well, I think there are a few ways.

I think first that the reading and writing of poetry helps us to develop self-understanding. Poet and author Robert McDowell, at the beginning of his book Poetry as a Spiritual Practice, states: “Through poetry, we gain greater self-understanding as well as insight into others in our world and into our world itself. It helps us discover the world anew, as if for the very first time—again and again–as each one of us must”.

Reading poetry can help us develop deeper self-understanding by giving language to what we are feeling but are unable to express in our own words. This is because good poets are excavators of their own inner lives, and if we are attentive readers, we will see our own hopes and fears and behaviors and emotions reflected in their words.

One of the reasons that poetry can bring about such understanding and comfort, is that “poetry slows down our metabolism of language” to quote Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar. With its line breaks and dense language, good poetry reading forces us to slow down, reflect on, and take in what’s being said to us.

It’s not just reading poetry that can help develop our self-understanding, however, it’s writing poetry. For me, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as teasing out an emotional complexity that’s been bothering me by writing a poem about it. As I said above, good poets are excavators of their own inner lives, so when we engage in the act of writing poetry ourselves, we are required to traverse and become acquainted with our own inner landscapes.

As we begin to journey deeper with poetry, I believe that it not only opens us up to our own interior lives, but it begins to expand our awareness beyond ourselves to help us realize our connection to all creatures. Poet and mindfulness teacher John Brehm writes in his book The Dharma of Poetry:

This belief that we are separate from the earth and superior to all other living things is the root cause of our suffering and the suffering we are inflicting on the planet….In a mindful or spiritual reading, what we want is to enter the poem, to live in the field of its imaginative energy for a time, to appreciate and experience it rather than think about it. The truth of non-separation–the absolute reality that we are simply another manifestation of life, that our bodies include the whole earth, that consciousness is not produced in the human brain but woven into the fabric of the universe–is a truth we may need to encounter a thousand times before we feel and believe and live it. But when we do experience this truth, even if only for a moment, it’s exhilarating.

A poem that to me beautifully illustrates this idea is Mary Oliver’s famous “Wild Geese”:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Notice how she begins with the life of the individual (“you do not have to be good”), then moves to the human community (“tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine”) and from there to the natural world (the sun, the rain, the prairies and deep trees, the mountains, the rivers, and the wild geese) before coming back to the individual again (“whoever you are”) and their place in the world (“your place in the family of things”). Read in the way Brehm recommends, this poem becomes a mystical experience of oneness with all of the universe.

In addition to deepening our self-understanding and our connection to the rest of the world, reading and writing poetry helps us to wrestle with paradox and not-knowing, particularly when it comes to the divine or the transcendent. Poetry is uniquely capable of this because of the ways it explores the elusive and multivocal nature of language, in metaphor, allegory, simile, etc. Mark S. Burrows writes in the introduction to his translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems:

‘Poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough), they are experiences,’ Rilke suggests. But what kind of experiences do they come from? More than a decade after composing these poems, Rilke described them as expressing the experience of ‘unbelief’ (Unglaube), but added that ‘such unbelief does not arise from doubt but rather from not-knowing and from beginner’s experience.’ This conviction, echoing the central teaching of Zen Buddhism on ‘beginner’s mind,’ shapes his poetry, early and late. In each of the first three poems Rilke starkly concedes, ‘I don’t know,’ a disclaimer that reflects his reluctance to move toward closure. It is an ‘unknowing’ that grounds his view of how we experience the sacred–in ourselves, in the ‘things’ of the world, and in the one addressed as the ‘You’ who is beyond names…

Perhaps put more simply, there are times in our lives when our sense of certainty and grounding evaporates, and didactic answers no longer make sense. The actor Ethan Hawke puts it this way:

Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, they have a life to live and they're not really concerned with Allen Ginsberg's poems or anybody's poems. Until... their father dies, you go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don't love you any more and all of a sudden you're desperate for making sense out of this life and "has anybody felt this bad before, how did they come out of this cloud?" Or the inverse, something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes, you love them so much you can't even see straight ... and that's when art's not a luxury, it's sustenance.

This neatly brings me to my last point, which is that poetry allows us to attempt to express the experience of the divine or transcendent. Burrows again, describing Rilke’s poems, states: “Poems like these reach through metaphor to the edges of our knowing, touching what Rilke here describes as the ‘hem’ of God’s presence”.

In my own tradition of Christianity, we have a tradition of mystical poetry starting in the Scriptures themselves (the Psalms and the mystical hymns in the writings of St. Paul) and continuing through writers such as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Dante, William Blake, Rilke, and even Mary Oliver. In other traditions such as Islam you have the mystical poems of Hafiz and Rumi, and in Hinduism the sacred texts of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita are written in verse. Almost every spiritual and religious tradition has some form of poetic expression within it that attempts to express the experience of the divine or transcendent encounter.

All of this reminds me of an episode of the podcast Turning to the Mystics, hosted by former monk and clinical psychologist James Finley. On one season they were exploring T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as mystic poetry. In the first episode, Finley had this to say about poetry:

There is a language that’s logical. It moves towards conclusions, towards definitions, and that’s important. But there’s also a language that bears witness to the undefinable. In this sense, for example, when two people say to each other, “I love you,” it’s something mystical and that their love for each other is not a fact. It isn’t something they can turn to like, “There it is.” So, it’s the language of lovers. It’s the language that comes up when we’re speaking to children. It’s the cry of the poor when the person’s crying out, or it’s the healing voice. It’s the voice of reassurance. And so, that’s the poetic voice. It’s endlessly evocative that it somehow evokes and embodies and invites us to rest in the intimacy of what we can’t explain. But it’s a substance of what matters more than anything and it really is the value of everything. And that’s the poet.

You want to stay human? Read poetry. And if you’re feeling adventurous, maybe write some of your own.