The Likelihood of Hope

11 July 2007

Keith Woodruff has a poignant article on his site about his new relationship to statistics since the passing of his son. I, too, have experienced a profound thinning of the security blanket of probability since our own loss. Every time I got on a plane to and from Oregon, I was keenly aware of how I now neither can nor want to go back to the kind of drowsy false security of my privileged first-world life; nor can I bear to live under constant threat in my mind.

Our nation likewise had the psychic fabric of its imperviousness rent by the attack on the Twin Towers by airplanes. It was an immeasurable tragedy. Yet other countries suffer such losses in greater numbers and more frequently; other families lose more children than those who see adulthood. How can we live, awake to such fragility, without, in the process, being crushed?

Poetry is a kind of faith. The audacity of poem-making, in a world saturated with throw-away words, a preference for television and music, and suspicious indifference to all but the ironic–is itself a profession of belief. To commit one’s life to this art in such times is as irrational as any religion. Truly, we write against the odds.

Tonight I have been reading the poems of Ilya Kaminsky–a Russian poet from Odessa, deaf since early childhood, who, a year after arriving in America with little English, lost his father suddenly. He writes about Mandelstam, Akhmatova and others who survived the un-survivable, writing poems for which they could be killed or worse. Here is a fierceness of faith in humanity. What we pass on to each other in such thin books of poems is some likelihood of greater self-understanding–and a precious likelihood of hope.

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Posted in Community, Grief Recovery, Insights, Life, Poetry | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

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  • http://www.diaryofaheretic.blogs.com Kathleen Maher

    “The audacity of poem-making, in a world saturated with throw-away words, a preference for television and music, and suspicious indifference to all but the ironic – is itself a profession of belief. To commit one’s life to this art in such times is as irrational as any religion.”

    I don’t think anyone except another poet can realize just how much faith and raw nerve writing poems require. In John Baker’s blog, I read your Randall Jarrell quote. It’s apt, I think, but perhaps unintentionally it promotes the idea that a poem occurs by sheer, random coincidence. Your description of the phases show it much more accurately.

    As to the mass appreciation of irony, my hunch is that in this era, the best-loved poems play hard and long with irony. Those are the ones I understand from one quick reading, in my head. When possible, I read poems out loud, to my family’s embarrassment. That factors into the atmosphere, too. Too many people find genuine passion impolite, if not pathetically self-indulgent. Everyone wants to be cool. By nature (lightening maybe), I can’t get there even if I wanted.

  • Robert

    Thanks for stopping by, Kathleen. There is a saying about academia which seems to have transferred to poetry: “the competition is so fierce because the stakes are so low.” I used to like to say this, because on the material level (money, recognition) it is true. Yet it occurs to me that the stakes psychically and (if you will) spiritually are so much greater, that may well be why we see this kind of desperate influx of new poets. The humanizing stakes are great – both in our world and in our writing.

    I don’t believe anyone’s nature is inherently ironic. Babies have little concept of irony. We socialize into irony as a means of defending our sensitive selves. And I agree there is a lot of passionate and pathetically self-indulgent poetry out there – trust me I’m not advocating for more. But as much as great poetry may require great audiences, it also, I think, has great potential – to infiltrate a jaded world with hope.