“it is wild country here
brothers and sisters”
Lucille Clifton
1. When I was a girl, I went for a walk with my sister in the Florida Keys, to the edge of a deep sound. It was night and we sat in stillness. I asked what we had come for and she told me to wait. Eventually a purple light rose to the surface, followed by another. Soon all the dark water was tracing the pulse of a multitude of purple lights, like thousands of lanterns crossing midnight water where oceans grow salt in long caves of wind and spirals, tiny jellies rising out of darkness to feed.
This is also how the flowers are blooming now across the woodland floor in this springtime of isolation. “Remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world,” writes Ocean Vuong.
2. When I sit with veterans diagnosed with PTSD in a back room of the VA hospital reading poetry together, the right poem will often feel like that first flicker of vanishing light rising out of the Void. We sit in silence, then begin to softly mirror back words and phrases that most seem to shine out from the poem. Each word spoken aloud into the darkness is another light rising to the surface until we are swimming in a world of upside down stars. At which point it might occur to us that an exquisite cosmos is always churning under the tangible Now, and sometimes through a poem, we can perceive ever so gently there may be something present we couldn't see before. That, in fact, what we’ve most needed is another way of Seeing.
3. Mythologist Martin Shaw said that "we are heavily defended against experiences of our beauty." And Rilke writes, “Let everything happen to you / Beauty and terror / Just keep going / No feeling is final.”
“Let” is a poetic word that signals the reader to enter into a different (and often ecstatic) way of Being in the World, and to create an invitational presence to The Unknown, the Unrevealed. When we have an encounter, or cultivate a poetic imagination, that is immense enough to hold the magnitude of omnipresent Terror and Beauty, of which we hardly even allow ourselves to acknowledge, we verify beyond our rational minds that things are possible which we have not yet been able to dream of, and we must cultivate the proper forms of approach. “Nearby is the country they call life. / You will know it by its seriousness. / Give me your hand.”
4. There is a universality to the “in-between identity,” when an old world is passing but the new has not yet been inhabited. Most often experienced by a diaspora looking back across a divide between what’s been lost or left behind from the isolation of not fully belonging to or identifying with a new culture. “It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.” (Salman Rushdie)
What we know now is that we are all suddenly pilgrims on the road together. That our togetherness is rising from our aloneness is the rocky terrain of Great Paradox, for which the hooves of poetry are well suited.
5. A yoga teacher I admire says that the purpose of yoga is to make space inside the body. Similarly, in an interview from the late 70’s, Robert Bly says, “Let's imagine a poem as if it were an animal. When animals run, they have considerable flowing rhythms. Also they have bodies. An image is simply a body where psychic energy is free to move around. Psychic energy can't move well in a non-image statement.”
The German mystic Meister Eckhart said that when the soul wants to have an experience, it throws an image out in front of itself, then finds a way to live into that image. And adding to the esotericism, the archetypal psychologist, James Hillman, urged that if you try to interpret an image, you kill it. Which only allows one to go deeper into relationship with The Unknown, whose lone signals emerging from the restless chaos present themselves as image and symbol. As a collective, we have too long neglected Imagination. Not imagination as fantasy, but the ancient secret honky-tonk club of intelligent angels and other possibilities. A roadhouse where sojourning deities drink by the fireside at night in disguise. We have entered the terrain of mythic time, when what once felt certain and linear has collapsed in on itself, and we are closer to a dream stupor.
6. “I can’t write a novel now…” wrote Chinua Achebe following the Nigerian civil war and ensuing social unrest, “I can write poetry - something short, intense, more in keeping with my mood.” In a season of anomy, and the social and psychological trauma that war brought, poetry allowed for a way to keep with intensity and shifting attentiveness, while still allowing the writer to be creatively engaged and immersed in social struggle. The Poetry of Witness is “a spiritual struggle of creative vision” according to Carolyn Forché.
Achebe again : “[Poetry] can find a way to point, however tentatively, at prospects and possibilities of healing.”
The poem is Orpheus’ song, able to move the heartstrings of the living and the dead, and potentially change the fates. The poem walks between worlds, grieving and singing.
7. When I went back to school for poetry as a single mother of four children, (because, what more practical choice is there?), I received grants to teach poetry to other mothers, many of whom had residual trauma as I did. My professor would insist that, “Poetry can’t be therapeutic, otherwise it will lead to Bad Poems.” I think of this now as reductionism. The way cynicism is self-protective against looking foolish.
The Greek root of poetry is “poesis” - which means “making” or “creation.” Which implies, always, possibility. “Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no name,” Toni Morrison famously said in her Nobel acceptance speech. “Oppressive language does more than represent violence. It is violence. It does more than represent the limits of knowledge. It limits knowledge.”
Adrienne Rich called language the “Arts of the Possible,” a way of creating new realities, of knowing ourselves, but also attending to the not-knowing Beyond ourselves. "I think of my poems as living in that restless no-man’s land between the news and the truth,” said Patricia Smith.
8. Meister Eckhart says we are all mothers of god, with an innate ability to birth new worlds from our interiority, to participate in incarnational reality. Krishnamurti taught us to never rely on knowledge we formed yesterday. Every moment is dying, and from that death is born a new Now. This Now needs its own language, its own navigational star charts. We must become spacious enough for Life to continually pour out itself as a waterfall in and through us - open to the awareness that we are not so separate from the world after all, not a “skin encapsulated ego,” but rather porous and charged with the same living Soul pulsing through All Life, birthing the Wild Gods of what is still to be Revealed.
Mary Ellen Lough is a poet and teaching artist working with women and veterans with trauma. She and her children live in southern Appalachia where she also forages wild herbs.
