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Random Acts of Poetry: Public Display of Affection
L.L. here. With a true confession. I love poetry. Adore it. Wish that someone would read it to me by moonlight. (All right, fair enough. That's not much of a confession. Most of you probably already suspected my passion for the poetic.)
Anyway, personal affection aside; I'm not here to talk about poetry in private. I'm here to discuss public displays of affection. Poetry in church, in classrooms, at presidential inaugurations, in newspapers and, heck, even on blog network front pages.
Why bother making space for poetry in public?
Former State poet Samuel Hazo observes that poetry "tells us who we are, what our surroundings mean to us and what waits to be discovered beneath the apparent." He contrasts this to the language of economy (think terms like profit, loss, consumer, value, spend, sell, bottom-line, assets ); such language tends to become "the language of quantity, not quality-- the language of abstraction and generality and not the language of felt thought."
Talk this way too long, says Hazo, and we risk personal dullness or even large-scale inhumanity.
(Maybe that's why God's Word is so astonishingly poetic. After all, it seeks to tell us who we are, what the world means, what the mystery of the divine is beneath the surface of life and language. Plus, God is anything but dull or inhumane.)
So then. Let me speak with the tongue of poetry, in public, by quoting poetic blogger Lore of Just to Say. I happened to read this the same day I was gaping at pictures of Gaza on the front page of the New York Times. Lore's poetic words helped me move past the abstractions and generalities, the large-scale pain, and inhabit the grief of this tragedy...
Today I fumble with excuses, mine, theirs, ours. They feel like gravel in my mouth and I repeat them, sure that repetition will make them more palatable.
We were not made for this, I finally land on. This, I know deep within me, is the only truthful excuse.
We were not made for this pain or this reminder. We were not built to be so resilient. We were not created to block these blows, holding out arms in defense. We were made for the shelter of wings and garden gates and fruit kept far away. We were made to endure pain like soldiers, but not for it....
We weren't designed for this...
Read Lore's full post here if you like. And don't be shy about clapping or sighing. This is, after all, a public display of affection for poetry. Or, in her case, for poetic prose.
The Duck Contingent photos, by Ann Voskamp of Holy Experience. See the awesome original full-size photos here.
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