I’m always happy to share reflections on poetry by guest bloggers—poets
whose work I respect and admire. I’m especially happy to post this thoughtful and thought-provoking essay by
my dear friend and colleague Michael T. Young.
Michael’s third and most recent poetry collection, The Infinite Doctrine
of Water, was published by Terrapin Books. His chapbook, Living
in the Counterpoint (Finishing Line Press), received the 2014 Jean
Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. His other
collections include The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost (Poets
Wear Prada), Transcriptions of Daylight (Rattapallax Press),
and Because the Wind Has Questions (Somers Rocks
Press). He received a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Council, as well as the Chaffin Poetry Award. His work has appeared or is
forthcoming in numerous print and online journals including The
Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, Edison
Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, The Potomac Review,
and Valparaiso Poetry Review. His work also appears in the
anthologies Phoenix Rising, Chance of a Ghost, In the
Black/In the Red, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems.
Michael lives with his wife, Chandra, and their children, Ariel and Malia, in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Breaking the Silence
Adrienne Rich said, “Every poem
breaks a silence that had to be overcome.” The silence that surrounds a poem—its
creation, publication—is intimidating, sometimes disheartening. The long
struggle for the right word is not simply a game; it is a confrontation with
the limits of a poet’s understanding, even the poet’s perception. Writing a
poem is a feeling in the dark for the light switch. It can be agonizing. The
work pulls us in the gut to get it right; it tugs at the viscera to be honest,
because words can cloud as easily as disclose. Intention and determination are
as vital as talent, perhaps more so, because the greatest talents determined to
dodge and duck behind words will leave in their wake nothing but halls of
mirrors for their readers.
Writing a poem is not just about being
honest about one’s personal life; it is about being honest about anything. It
is about fighting the very human tendency only to see what conforms to our existing
opinion, or shaping the lines to guide others only to understand in the way we
acknowledge as right, picking words to narrow rather than expand the view.
These are nuances, subtleties, shifts in tone or diction that may escape readers—or
writers—who are not looking for them or comparing in their mind the given with
other, unnamed options. To struggle and wrestle and fight with oneself for
days, for weeks, sometimes for months or years to get that word, that line,
that image right in spite of oneself, to then struggle and wrestle and fight to
get it into print to be met with the sound of silence, can make that battle
feel like a defeat. But it isn’t; the poem on the page is a triumph, the essay
on the page is a success. Those words on the page knock against each other and
make the right music, the right pitch and cadence. They open up what was inside
you, they disclose a clarity that was once hidden.
Poets live with the knowledge
that clarity is not a given; it is a battle, a willed victory over obscurity.
Obscurity, ambiguity, and mystery are the norm, whether it’s in the shape of
feelings buried in cliché, an insight stuffed into pedestrian language, or an
unusual idea wearing a threadbare metaphor. These are the halls of everyday
life. It’s not that every moment must be lived as an epiphany. Just as living
in a perpetual state of emergency would lead to a nervous breakdown, so too
would a state of perpetual epiphany destroy the psyche. But when the moment, the
feeling, or the thought is something more than the language we’ve known, then it
requires work, not only to share it with others, but to clarify it to one’s own
mind. Without that effort, it will vanish into the vagueness of the given, the
known. The unique is almost impossibly difficult. Like a curmudgeon, it will
accept nothing but its own terms. If we dress it in yesterday’s clothing, it
leaves us for a better party, a better mind.
Another consequence of our daily
linguistic vagueness is that real understanding between people is quite rare.
For the most part, we move along in a drift of suggestion and approximation,
going in the same direction but most often not in the same raft. True
understanding takes a great determination on the part of both the speaker and
the listener (or the writer and the reader). So where two minds meet in that
invisible space created by what becomes a common language between them, where
the words chiming in one head manage to reach and orchestrate the pitch and
timing of thought and feeling in the head of another—that space is a
consequence of great effort from both directions. It is neither natural nor
common, but quite unnatural and rare. When it happens, this uniting power and
beauty in language is a kind of magic. For the understanding it conjures can
take place across time and space, as when I read Gerard Manley Hopkins and, in
that moment, my mind locked in to the beauty and power of his words, they
create a space in my mind where he lives again while, simultaneously, my
humanity is enriched and deepened by the precision and textures of his writing.
Whether it pierces the mind’s eye
As kingfishers
catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over
rim in roundy wells
Stones ring
Or it warns us:
O if we but knew
what we do
When we delve
and hew—
Hack and rack
the growing green!
In each instance, the poetry gathers
us around it like a fire to be warmed and given light. This is the power poetry
has against what tries to divide us. That power starts with breaking the silence
in oneself.
Lucile Clifton has a poem called
“Memory” in which she traces the disparity between a daughter’s recollection
and a mother’s recollection of the same event. The shared event is going out to
purchase the young girl’s first adult shoes. The daughter recalls the
salesman’s bigotry, his bullying and swagger. But the speaker says her mother
“tells it better than I do.” The mother insists there was no bullying, bigoted,
white salesman who shamed them. Her desperate desire to make a good memory out
of a bad situation pushes her to create a fantasy. The speaker in holding to
the truth becomes the adult. But the denial of history inherent in the mother’s
false version becomes a division between mother and daughter in the context of
a racist society. This is the pain that word “better” carries. This is the
trauma locked inside the repetition in the poem of “ask me/how it feels.” The poem
is a version of how we break silence, how we give voice by facing down the
shadows that would intimidate us into accepting things as they are, or worse,
creating fantasies in denial of it.
Shelley famously said that poets
were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. I would suggest they are a
kind of unacknowledged soldier. The silences in ourselves, those that arise as
part of the cultural expectations we internalize and express as an aesthetic
are as much a form of censorship as any other. In fact, these are more
efficient and effective than political censorship. To turn against those
silences takes courage and determination. A poet willing to ask, “What voices
are being silenced in my writing that must be heard?” is questioning the very
assumptions that make their identity. But in the end, that battle to give voice
to the silences within expands both the poet’s humanity and vision, and in the
poem becomes a way for readers to experience the same.
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Thank you,
Michael!
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