The Poetry of Day to Dayness

For Honors Writing students in Indiana, PA in the late 1980s—inspired by the work of Sue Saniel Elkind

The poetry of utilitarian things—of useful things—of the everyday and ordinary—that's how I understand this phrase, greets us every day if we look, if we can bear to see them or hear them…the love songs of discards…the poetry of moving. Is that another way of saying that the poet or the person is a visionary? A visionary and a missionary proselytizing for this world…a visionary or a shaman—who throws the bones or buttons to help make a connection between voice and nonvoice...between earth and sky. I think it is the poem that comes and speaks to her/him and not the other way around. The poet is the smoother-outer, the mediator. True poetry is not an exercise I believe—though it may come from peeling the onion or opening the door or talking to your car.

Once I heard a contemporary poet say something like, "Saying what a poem means is like summarizing Mother Goose." I tell my students (you) sometimes, too, that it is wrong to approach poetry that way. To say what it means—to talk about poetry instead of poem seems wrong. To talk in the presence of a poem seems sacrilege. Emily Dickinson said it is either Oh or Ouch feelings. And she is right. If I were wise enough to know what I actually do or gets done "through me" I would have to say I didn't ask to see the faces on doorknobs. It happens…like making connections between the steps in a recipe that teaches you how to cook something delicious. You will have a sacher torte at the end. But you don't see the end right away.

The poet as beholder is also a cook. A poem I have written includes facts about how people walk—it was triggered by information in a beautiful nature magazine. I thought—now that's a poem: that Percy and Mary Byssche Shelley eloped and walked 350 miles, that Coleridge walked 10 miles a day. And why that is a poem I don't know. And why "cutting your finger" is also a poem I don't know.

But there is poetry in information—and there is also poetry in conversation—it is up to us to hear and to see—and then the treasures can leap out of the chest. The life of the stone frees the imagination. But we have to listen well.

Perhaps a favorite activity of mine growing up in the years right after WWII was making something out of nothing. That's a good practice for a poet. I made dolls out of bottles and wagons out of cookie boxes. I wanted the real thing but what I didn't have, I tried to make. Sometimes it made me angry—that it wasn't beautiful. There was truth in that activity from the beginning—and we experience that—sitting in a circle with others and hearing deeply.