“…how amiable the gorgeous advantage of the newly born.”

I am somewhere over the Midwest as I type this, returning to the West Coast from a weekend in Boston. Val and I made the trip to attend a very special wedding. Seeing two dear friends–both kind, courageous men–exchange vows with each other, and blessings with all in attendance, renewed my understanding of what marriage is all about.

We stayed in the Omni Parker House Hotel, home to Emerson and Longfellow’s Saturday Club, and spent what little time we had on this trip getting acquainted with American history up close. We visited beautiful old churches, and made the trip up to Harvard–a school founded by Puritans to unite scholarship with spiritual pursuit.

Though most of us made the trip from California, Massachusetts turned out to be the perfect place for this kind of wedding. It was the first state to abolish slavery, a haven for religious diversity, salvation to the starving Irish, a haunt of Franklin, and later, the Transcendentalists–peopled with the inheritors of great wisdom and fierce compassion; steeped, on every Boston street corner, in our nation’s founding ideals.

We also made this journey to meet a very special wedding guest–the two grooms’ newly-adopted daughter. At lunch today, I got to hold her. She is the first baby I have held in my arms since our son, James, died four years ago. And yet the experience was pure joy. When she opened her eyes, and looked in my face, she started smiling, and laughing, and delight seemed to bounce between us, gathering up our faces in grins and giggles.

I picked up a hard-to-find book of poems by Marvin Bell at Grolier’s just outside Harvard, and have been reading it on the plane. A poem that begins, “The dead man encounters horrific conditions infused with beauty,” also contains the phrase: “…how amiable the gorgeous advantage of the newly born.” I read it, and thought of this lucky little girl, who will come to embrace love’s many facets as naturally as she forms her radiant smile.  And arcing now across a small, dark section of globe, fresh hope lights up inside of me–for myself, for my country, and this beautiful, incomprehensible world.

Another tactic that sometimes helps me get things flowing again is to revisit an old favorite. Ralph Waldo Emerson is eminently quotable; his essay The Poet reads like a poem in itself. It is remarkable to read some of his thoughts and realize certain conditions in poetry are hardly new or unique. So, I pulled a few excerpts from this 1844 text that seem to be as relevant to contemporary poetry as they were to poetry back then.

Notwithstanding the necessity to be published, adequate expression is rare.

The sign and credentials of a poet are, that he announces that which no man foretold.

For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.

Of course, the value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds.

A beauty, not explicable, is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of.

The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics!

The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.

Every word was once a poem.

This insight, which expresses itself by what I called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

So the poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so low and plain, that the common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze.

We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He would say nothing else but such things. In our way of talking we say, “That is yours, this is mine;” but the poet knows that it is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you…

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, “It is in me, and shall out.”

…wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be ale to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

The notion that many nascent poets have that they might somehow pollute or corrupt their voice through immersion in other poets’ work simply has not proved remotely true in my own experience. Quite the opposite–I find that reading poetry seems to activate my poetic mind, to get me into the music of poetry (even if they are not the rhythms I prefer), and to stimulate more creative and original work than if I were to simply sit down by myself in an empty room and try “to be original.” The notion of being fed artistically is one that is very important to me–in fact central to my current pursuit of writing–and this technique seems to be a kind of filling up to overflowing, so that I can write out of the overflow of creative energy rather than swirling the dregs of deficit.