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The
word "poetry"
derives from the ancient Greek "poema," something made. "Relevant"
derives from the French "relevare" (to raise up) meaning "helpful"
in a personal sense, and ultimately goes back to the Latin "leuis"
or "light." I thought I would speak personally about making
-- soul making -- and words, and the shedding of light.
My generation I was a product of war -- World War II -- and its dislocations.
By the third grade I had moved nine times. I gave up on trying to make
friends, since we'd always be leaving soon. My Dad was hospitalized,
and we struggled to make ends meet, living with family members or in
veterans' projects. In one school I was the only white kid; in another,
the only poor one. Through all the changes one thing was constant: words--
in books my parents read me, and words in the Bible, since God had a
way of coming along.
Poetry was again a refuge from culture shock when I left the place my
folks eventually settled -- the countryside north of Santa Barbara,
California -- for college at Berkeley.
Berkeley in the 60's was chaotic and liberating, especially for someone
like me, raised in the boonies (tullies, we called them) in a conservative,
strict household run on military rules. (Back home, the nearest neighbor
had been five miles by car and two by horse. Luckily I had access to
a horse.)
At Berkeley I was painfully shy and didn't know a soul in that huge
terrifying institution of 40,000 with classes of 2,000 taught by professors
over closed circuit TV. I became an anti-Vietnam activist and was beaten
up by Hells Angels in an Oakland demonstration. When I came home to
visit, my father and I had terrific arguments over politics -- he imagined
I had become a Communist. Like many in the anti-war movement, I felt
desperate, angry and impatient with the government for drafting my male
age-mates and for killing innocent people in a civil war half a world
away. When the university allowed Berkeley police to come on campus
and jail 800 peaceful student demonstrators, I almost dropped out.
Words saved me. In one of those gigantic survey courses in English Literature
I came on the pre-Romantic poet William Blake, a deeply spiritual visionary,
but also a revolutionary activist. His "Proverbs of Heaven and
Hell" immediately spoke to me --it was as if he had written them
especially with me in mind. I'm quoting from memory:
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Better to murder an infant in its crib than nurse an unacted desire.
Looking back, I can see that Blake articulated and legitimized my own
rebelliousness, idealism and activism. He was a bold spirit who questioned
authority and created vast spiritual epics, which he illustrated with
his own paintings and drawings executed in his uniquely visionary style.
His poems and art ran counter to all I'd been taught in my strict, conservative
home. They gave me the courage, too, to believe in myself:
No bird flies too high if it soars on its own wing.
Then a close friend introduced me to Yeats. We'd backpack in the Sierras
and sing Yeats' poems to old border ballad melodies, especially his
early romantic lyrics, inspired by folksongs. His poems praised beauty
for its own sake, without reference to ethics or politics. In Yeats
I learned how shocking and subversive beauty is, and I woke up to the
magic in the music of poetry -- how it unfolds obliquely, haltingly,
in physical patterns of lip and tongue, syllable and sound, rhyme and
half rhyme, beat and half beat. I loved the speaking silence of what
Yeats left unsaid, as in the utter, exhausted truth-telling simplicity
of the ending of this poem:
Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
The poem is gorgeously beautiful, and it's about how beauty isn't enough.
Look at the overpowering sincerity of the quiet, flat last line, where
the glory and cadence seem to fall away under the pressure of emotion.
At the end the poet seems unable to speak at all, so that he resorts
to simple repetition. He has no hope or energy left: almost every syllable
bears the same stress. The fourth line is particularly magical, I think,
for its cadenced internal rhyme, yet it is the last line that breaks
our hearts.
When I ended up at graduate school at Harvard, I again fell deeply into
dislocation and culture shock, made worse by the alienating formality
of that institution and the endless icy winters. I'd go home from seminars
and write fragmented notes in order to keep my sanity. I could only
write at night when my roommate was asleep. These were my first real
poems. Several of them were published, in the American Poetry Review
and the Harvard Advocate.
These were homesick poems. I missed California, its mountains and wild
Pacific coast and clean desert outlines, and the smells and flat Western
cadence of speech. Though I took poetry writing courses with Robert
Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop -- great teachers -- I was reading Gary
Snyder most of all. He was from my part of the world, and his West Coast
poems transported me back home. Reading him evoked the smoky bitterness
of black coffee brewed over a campfire, the lavish purple of lupine
on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, and incense cedar's dizzying perfume.
His years of Zen study in Japan and the US shone in his seemingly simple
poems. Since I had been practicing Zen for some years by then, I read
and reread Gary Snyder. Through his poems he became my teacher. When
I eventually met him in the flesh, I was delighted, but it was the poems
that lit up my life.
My favorite poem of his was and remains
"Piute Creek," a complex poem that embodies a moment of enlightenment.
Its first stanza ends:
Words and books
Like a small creek off a high ledge
Gone in the dry air.
Harvard was exceedingly scholastic. Snyder's poems like "Piute
Creek" went beyond words and books and back to the wilderness and
the Tao as the great source.
Around that time I read Margaret Atwood's poems. They helped me grasp
my situation as a woman at Harvard, where there were no tenured women;
where we studied almost no works by women; and where my mail was addressed
to Mr. Van Spanckeren, and my wife
was invited to bake cookies:
You fit into me
like a hook and an eye
a fish hook
an open eye.
My second scholarly book was on Atwood, whose work continues to be a
presence in my life.
I went to Harvard to work with Albert Lord, who had collected twentieth
century folk epics from Yugoslavia out of the tradition that inspired
Homer. I wanted to collect Tibetan oral epics and save them from obliteration
by the Chinese government. I could get no funding from any source, because
the US government was in rapprochement with China. I studied Tibetan
on my own, saved money from teaching at Harvard, and managed to backpack,
with my tape recorder, to Tibetan border refugee areas of Nepal. It
turned out that the Tibetan I'd laboriously learned was Lhasan (literary);
naturally the illiterate border peoples who continued the oral tradition
spoke dialects.
Trekking two seasons in the 14,000 foot plateaus and staying in shamanist
villages, I realized that only a native Tibetan could fully understand
this rich culture and its oral poetry. If that was so, only an American
could most deeply grasp present day American literature. I began to
see my project in Nepal as cultural imperialism. The Tao Te Ching says,
in chapter forty-seven,
The further you go, the less you know
therefore the sage arrives without going.
I returned to the US to study contemporary American literature, especially
that of women and (as I am part Cherokee) minorities. I was sure I'd
never get to travel again, which distressed me, since I most wanted
to live and work in other cultures.
Perhaps I had gotten so used to constant dislocation that cultural change
had become necessary to my psyche. Nevertheless, I resolved to stay
home and study that which I could know best. I took Socrates' advice,
to know thyself, seriously. For years I imagined my explorations were
over. Writing poetry kept my imagination and dreams alive. I kept being
drawn for poetic inspiration to non-Americans: ancient Zen poets and
teachers, and recent European and Latin Americans. Because I love poetry
and wrote poetry and organized readings series, I was fortunate enough
to meet many U.S. poets. I published articles and books. I directed
summer institutes for foreign professors specializing in U.S. literature.
I wrote a short history of U.S. literature for non-Americans.
Eventually I was invited abroad as a specialist in American literature
and a poet. I have been lucky enough to work with teachers, students
and lovers of U.S. literature in Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America,
and Africa. My history of US literature is being distributed and translated
around the world. As in the Tao Te Ching, occurrences are brought about
by their opposites.
These trips are not vacations -- they bring culture shock and heartache.
One friend in Indonesia died of poverty (she was too poor to buy antibiotics).
Others, professors and students and writers, live without books. I have
had to work through civil war (in the Philippines), terrorism (in Egypt),
and epidemic disease. I have discovered, though, that -- more than we
know in the U.S. -- the world listens to poetry: it is our common human
language. No tyrants and no terrorists and no MTV can permanently silence
it. The more it is suppressed, the more it triumphs, as we see in the
recent history of countries such as Poland, home of the newest Nobel
Prize-winning poet, where important poets fill soccer stadiums with
enthusiastic listeners. My joy is to learn the poetry -- oral folk poetry
and written literature -- of the countries I work in, and to help people
abroad know our literature.
I do not think my experience is special. Our lives are complex and stressful,
and we search for meaning our whole lives long. We can say that culture
shock is part of the human condition, and that writers are permanent
strangers who bear witness.
In my life, difficulty led me to my true teachers
-- poets, most of them dead, showed me that the way ahead
lay under my feet. I wrote this account in the hope that listeners might
take a moment to reflect on the poets who were true teachers in their
lives. Why were their voices important? What horizons did those poet-teachers
point to? What mountains, what obstacles lay behind? What shapes loom
ahead? Book of poetry are flagstones in an unseen path, one flagstone
mysteriously leading to the next. What will you read tomorrow, or today?
Who will light your path?
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