November 4, 5, 6

(Published in Mosaic, June 2011)

Where is poetry ‘at’ today? Is it more than the least-bought, longest-browsed section of your local bookstore?  Do you see it as the domain or a few insiders who get it? Content for fringe hipsters who are ‘in’ on it?   

I’ve come to my eighty-five year old mother-in-law for the answer. She was born in Kerry, Ireland, that place still sometimes referred to as the mythical ‘kingdom’.  When I first travelled to Kerry, sometime in the early 90s, it gradually crept up on me that this was a place apart, a living remnant of the pre-modern world, where, it seemed to me at least, poetry still actively informed consciousness. It gave me cause, perhaps for the first time, to lament the relentless hegemony of rationalism.  Ah, so was this what Linton Kwesi Johnson was saying to me with his “Reality Poem”:

            dis is di age af reality

            but some a wi a deal wid mitalagy

            dis is di age af science an teknalagy

            but some a wi a check fi antiquity       

A Kerry-woman, my mother-in-law quotes the poets she read as a child and over the years has added other voices, new poets she has read and re-read and read again.  In moments of wonder, of tenderness, of hardship, or of inhuman violence, she will quote the lines of Yeats or Keats or Goldsmith.  When they were small, she took my children for walks in a Dublin park and as they spoke of their dreams  –  to teach or explore or to fight for a just world – she answered with lines of poetry.  

She and that place she comes from represent something and I think it might be what Ken Kesey was talking about when he said,

"As I've often told Ginsberg, you can't blame the President for the state of the country, it's always the poets' fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold."    (www.edge.org/3rd_culture).

For three days, on the eve of the long winter, some of the finest poets from our country and beyond gather in Durham to share visions and fire sparks. 

I went to Words Aloud for the first time only in 2010, despite the fine example of my mother-in-law and the urging of fine writer friends who said it was a place I had to be. Somehow I was always just too busy.  To make up for non-attendance in past years, I took with me both my sisters and my mom. 

I have to confess we scratched our collective heads for poet number one on Friday night and I sweated a bit thinking I might never live this down(dragging them along).  Head scratching turned to giggling bemusement for poet number two (involving a goldfish impersonation).  Yet, by poet number three we were on our feet cheering. 

When all was done and dusted by Sunday dinner time, I thought of Ronna Bloom’s line: “I am so fluid it scares me” (Ronna Bloom, Asylum) and scrawled on my feedback slip that I wanted to take up permanent residence in poetry land, find out how to get back to the ‘kingdom’, to live in a world where we collectively ‘hang on the lower lips’ of our poets, and follow their lead toward justice and life.