Two chapters from Poetry as Survival

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2002 by Orr, Gregory

The following two pieces are excerpted from a book entitled Poetry as Survival, which will be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2002 as part of its Life of Poetry series. The first piece is the preface to the book; the second a chapter on Emily Dickinson.

The book presents a cultural and psychological context for what I call the "personal lyric." A central premise is that the personal lyric is omnipresent in human cultures because it serves an essential function: to assist in the survival of individuals as they undergo existential crises. The first third of the book presents a psychological model for that survival. The second third explores the linguistic and experiential dynamics of the personal lyric and how they assist in survival. The final third historicizes the survival project while examining the work of five poets (Wordsworth, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, and Wilfred Owen) in relation to trauma and the transformations poetry can effect. The first two-thirds of the book proposes that the writing and reading of personal lyrics restabilizes the self destabilized by some form of disorder, be it joyous or catastrophic. The final third considers the situation of poets whose very self has been threatened with annihilation by trauma of one sort or another. Paradoxically, this annihilation of self presents the poet with a necessity and an opportunity: to create a new self in the body of the work. To use an image favored by both Keats and Whitman, the transformative poet must, like a spider, create a new web of meanings and relationships to replace the web shredded by trauma. Each lyric poem by such a poet can be seen as a web the self spins from "his own inwards" and briefly inhabits (like the "airy Citadel" and "beautiful circuiting" Keats celebrates in his letter of February 19, 1818). The new self and the new meanings the poems disclose not only sustain the poet, but also discover visionary possibilities for readers-new ways of being and new human possibilities or values.

Preface: Everywhere and Always

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

-William Carlos Williams from "Asphodel, that Greeny Flower"

As a poet, I've always hated the fact that poetry often intimidates people. Many people I know feel that poetry is a test they can only pass if they are smart enough or sensitive enough, and most fear they will fail. Many refuse the test altogether-never read poetry-for fear of failure. Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its value and purpose, and in doing so, we have lost contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives.

There is something special about poetry and about lyric poetry in particular, but it's not what most people think. It's not that poetry is written by very intelligent or very sensitive people and is appreciated only by others of equal intelligence and sensitivity. What's special is quite the opposite of this elitist notion of poetry. What's special is that lyric poetry is written down or composed in every culture on the planet at this moment, which means something like i,ooo different cultures and 3,000 different languages. All cultures on the globe have a conception of the personal lyric. What's more, members of all these cultures feel free to write it down or compose it aloud as song or chant, whether they are from tribes in the equatorial rain forests or Inuit and Eskimo in the frozen Arctic; whether they live in Paris or Buenos Aires or Beijing.

In addition to being omnipresent on the planet at this moment, lyric poetry appears to have been written and composed in every ancient or historical culture we have been able to investigate. For all we can tell, poetry may be almost as ancient as the use of language itself Certainly, when civilizations first made use of written language, poetry was among the first things chosen to be preserved by this new technology of permanence. The Homeric epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, transmitted orally for several centuries, were written down 2,700 years ago, shortly after the development of the Greek alphabet, and the lyric poems of Archilochus and Sappho followed soon after. In China, the collection known in the West as The Book of Songs or The Book of Odes was also transmitted orally for several centuries before being written down almost 2,500 years ago. Many of these ancient Chinese poems are lyrics that speak about things that still matter in our lives, like the love longing in this one spoken by a woman:

Blue, blue your collar,

sad sad my heart:

though I do not go to you,

why don't you send word?

Blue blue your beltstone,

sad sad my thoughts:

though I do not go to you,

why don't you come?

Restless, heedless,

I walk the gate tower.

One day not seeing you

is-three months long.

-Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, p. 30

How simple such a poem is and yet how emotionally complete and amusing-how easy it is for us to enter into the situation and the speaker's feelings. And yet it was written over three thousand years ago.