A Poet's Choice...

                                                                                Robert Bly, Poet



                                 The poet makes a meadow from each leaf.
                                 Each curve of language turns into a lamb's ear
                                 Because a genius is a child in the house of suffering.
                                                          -- Robert Bly
                                    (The Night Abraham Called To The Stars)

It's unlikely Robert Bly ever really had a choice: except for that yes or no... does any poet ever really wrestle with to be a poet or not? Oh to be sure, most of us do wrestle with how to make enough money to live: but we learn how to make do: washing dishes, tending bar, driving truck, and some are lucky enough to be teaching kids... but all of us poets were born with a specific itch...

​An interior itch is worse than a hemorrhoid itch... and the only possible scratch is with words... a line or two, like these four! from William Blake: I give you the end of a golden string / Only wind it into a ball / It will lead you in at Heaven's gate / Built in Jerusalem's wall. Something to say... something, the poet is sure, that needs to be said...

​Even a seemingly mundane moment, like this one that begins a poem by Robert Bly, can ease its way into space for undying mystery: A man and a woman sit near each other... [from A Third Body]... The poet's choice is always to search for and to chase down: the word the line the essential stuff of the universe and everything that matters...

​Language is a means of communicating: it is always all about a you and an I... all of the arts are the same, only the medium changes: music, painting, sculpting, dance, photography, film, song: all of art is always an I and a you... The I is never a solitary one... I is also always us... The poet is searching for that one line that can save the Universe...

​Picking up on the Greek Logos, the early Christian mystics identified Jesus of the Beloved as the Logos, or Word... specifically as the Word of the Divine: the Voice was that of the Divine Consciousness, and the spoken Word was the means by which, and through which, everything that matters came into being... I think it more magical to think of the Poem, and not "just" Word... 

​Here's Coleman Barks translating the first line of a Rumi poem: I, you, he, she, we... even though those five words are the most sacred, they are still not enough... so Rumi adds: In the garden of mystic lovers / these are not true distinctions... See! There's the line that could, in fact, save the Universe... "Distinctions" are the stuff of privilege, profit, and power (the Unholy Trinity)... Without distinctions, there is only us... "Us" is where things are clarified... Quite a few people scoff at the idea of Word become flesh... or of Bread become body... but when distinctions disappear, out go the defintions of difference: then what if and why not become the questions of building a bridge...

Reaching for a stack of my poems and thumbing through them, I stop with a poem entitled Dripping... the first line is not going to save the Universe, but it does set the scene for the second: The sun shines and rains upon my skin / Like a tongue dripping pleasure... without end... And it goes on to be about a gathering of poets... A fundamental human need is for song and conversation: for the kind of conversations that unlock doors, that fling open the shutters of the abandoned rooms of the heart, and that convince us that we were born for ecstasy!

​Reading the news, it's impossible not to see how measely so many lives have become! How incredibly small and tiresome are the speeches of political leaders, the pronouncements of religious leaders, and the hunger for celebrity that infects entire cultures... I once sat about fifteen feet away from Coleman Barks as he read from his translations of Rumi. His eyes read those poems for me, and he knew it, as he bore down into my eyes... That's it! The poet, not unlike the Original Voice, gives birth to the Word... and at least for a moment, I, you, he, she, we do not matter: those distinctions of difference are not real... 

​Jesus was a Poet. Christmas is a celebration of the Poet's Choice... to listen to the Voice of one's heart... to collect a word here and a word there... to string those few words together... and no matter what words make their way onto paper, they always, in the final analysis boil down to Here take this Bread, it is my Body, given to you... Only a Poet could have imagined such a wonderful line...

I write poetry because I have to... -- James A. Autry
Now tonight / I am a burning bush / my bones a grill of fire... -- Jimmy Santiago Baca
Poetry is my passion. It is my art. It is my love. -- Marilyn Chin
Poetry began when somebody walked off a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ah-h-h!" That was the first poem. -- Lucille Clifton
​She bears / the rainbowed layers of charity and murmurs / all of you / even the least of you... -- Rita Dove
One day in the eighth grade the teacher came in and said, "All right, everyone's got to write a poem." We were dumbfounded -- a poem? -- Joy Harjo
We have the same problems that everybody else has. -- Jane Kenyon
My first hunger of every day is to let words come through me... -- Naomi Shiab Nye
There is a seething, burgeoning poetry out there... -- Adrienne Rich
How Poetry Comes To Me... It comes blundering over the / Boulders at night...
-- Gary Snyder
I could not live if I didn't write poetry... -- Daisy Zamora