Feature

Poetry in the Air

Interview with Sarah Wider


 

Sarah Wider is professor of English and Women's Studies at Colgate University in Madison County, New York, U.S.A. A founding member, and current president, of the Emerson Society, she is the author of The Critical Reception of Emerson: Unsettling All Things and Anna Tilden, Unitarian Culture and the Problem of Self-Representation.
 

SGI Quarterly: What is poetry?

Sarah Wider: My definition of poetry is broad and lively and open. I think of poetry as a wonderfully active presence in our lives. Of course it comes in the form of words, but it also means a way of perceiving the world around us--our relationships, our role in this world and in those relationships. Poetry gives us the opportunity to think about things together.

Of course, poetry means words on the page, but it also can be the words that we speak or the words that we have listened to over time. Poems appear in songs, and they are given in teachings from one generation to the next. Poetry is that which speaks to our hearts, enabling us to see more clearly what we each need to do in any given moment and what our responsibility is.

SGIQ: How would you assess the health of poetry in contemporary society? Is there enough poetry, too little poetry, in people's lives today?

SW: For certain sectors of society, I would say there is definitely not enough poetry.

To give one example, I had a student in a class I was teaching last year from a relatively privileged background. He came right out and said: "Poetry doesn't matter, it's a dead form." And while some of the students agreed with him, there was a great deal of discomfort from students who come from different traditions, students for whom poetry matters greatly. There are students, for example, for whom hip-hop music is big, or students who participate in a poetry culture with their friends. It's in spoken word, in the music they dance to. For these young people, poetry is far from a dead form: it's the air they breathe.
 

A Communal Art

SGIQ: Can you talk more about forms of poetry that isn't words on a page?

SW: So much poetry comes from oral traditions. Here, poetry has never been envisioned as something that would be written down for just one individual to read at a time. Poetry was always understood as vibrant, immediate, unending, always meant to be shared communally.

I already mentioned youth culture. You have people who are doing spoken word, where people are using their voices for social change, calling awareness to real inequities. This is where there is a lot of the impetus for poetry and where poetry always has been the voice of the people.

The folk tradition in poetry goes back--I think you could say "forever." Because the power of the spoken word is the power that has always been available to everyone. It wasn't the privilege of the few, it has always been the words that have been available to all people to create something meaningful to share with everybody. Any time people are protesting and are calling out rhythmic or rhyming chants, there is the impetus of poetry behind it.

SGIQ: How have you encountered poetry among the Pueblo people of the Southwestern United States, with whom you have a deep association?

SW: Here there are also songs that go back "forever." There are songs that people can't put any date on because they are remembered over time and have been kept within the community, passed from generation to generation. People will just say, "That is a very old song," and one of the ways they know that is because there are words in that song that aren't in daily use any longer.

Tewa Dancers From the North perform the Eagle Dance at a Pueblo arts and crafts show in New Mexico, U.S.A.  [©Erich Schlege/Dallas Morning News/Corbis]

When people are getting ready for a particular dance, for example, on a feast day--I can only talk about those that are appropriate to be talked about beyond the community, where the rest of us are welcomed--people will gather together for weeks beforehand and create the songs together. It's hard to explain, and my understanding is indeed small. The songs are always connected to songs from the past. There are always the songs for whatever is being danced, but the songs are always created anew each time by those particular people coming together.

It reminds me of the transformative power in poetry--poetry's ability to place us within a larger understanding. It might be more accurate to say that the impulses within poetry aspire to something close to what happens within the Pueblo song.

SGIQ: Do you think there is a greater need today for public poetry?

SW: Whether fair to certain 20th-century poetry or not, there is certainly the perception that the most "sophisticated" poetry of the century turned inward and adopted a detached voice that observed, but did not involve itself within, society. In a word, poetry privatized. In the United States there has been a strong distrust of poetry that takes on public concerns or speaks in an overtly public voice. Such works have been castigated as "propaganda poetry" or dismissed as ideological. We don't seem to want the poet talking about public issues.

And there is something very small-minded or shortsighted about the way that the judgments have been made. Oftentimes those judgments have come from within an academy that protects certain kinds of poetry. It also tends to suggest that there is only one audience for poetry, too, a very educated audience, and that this is the superior audience. This has been deeply troubling for me wherever and whenever it occurs, because it creates an elite audience for poetry. Which is very bizarre in a democratic society.

A literary café‚ in Baghdad, 2003, where poets, writers and journalists have met for over a hundred years for dialogue and debate  [©Jason Florio/Corbis]

So when I look to the public aspect of poetry, the public voice within poetry, what becomes so forceful is the role of poetry that [the American philosopher Ralph Waldo] Emerson (1803-82) spoke of and which Walt Whitman (1819-92) took up in his own work as a poet. Here, the poet was the advocate of the people and the poet was a prophet, the one who would say the hard, unpopular things that no one wanted to hear. And certainly in today's society, and probably any society, that is precisely what a poet can do.

I certainly love prose, but poetry, because of its ability to deliver images differently from prose, has that capacity to speak to us that much more directly and in many ways more intimately, to make us feel that we are standing alone and perhaps more vulnerably. I think that capacity of language in poetry has the power to deliver us our truths.

When I think about Daisaku Ikeda's poetry, he has always had that voice that is very direct and very appealing in two senses. Appealing to the reader first in the sense of being very accessible. A person can just pick it up, they don't have to have a PhD in English to read it. You can sit and read it and think about it and use your own mind to understand this poem.

The other sense of the word "appealing" is that in his poems he is always asking us to do something, to take his words and understand what our responsibility is. So in this sense, he is appealing to us to understand that there is something to be done in this world right now. And again I think that is the public aspect of poetry. I think that is very powerful and very necessary in our world right now, or in fact in any time and any world that I can imagine into the furthest foreseeable future. I do think Daisaku Ikeda stands in that tradition of the individual who is willing to say what is unpopular and what is the risky thing to say.
 

The Poet in Us All

SGIQ: Can you describe, from a personal perspective, what you find the deepest, most satisfying experience of poetry?

SW: Quite simply, poetry has been the one constant in times of upheaval. It speaks solace, comfort, hope in times of loss. When human communication in real time fails--and it does all too often--poetry succeeds.

I turn to poetry when friends cannot be reached, when judgment is the mode of operation where I work, when violence dominates. In the words of a poem, the reader finds revelation, reassurance, insight, companionship. "I have felt this, seen this, done this." It makes one think "Here is how I would say this very thought, if only I could speak so clearly."

SGIQ: What does "the poet" stand for, and is there a poet in all of us?

SW: I do believe that we can all be poets. I think that often people think that because they don't have a particular way with words, that excludes them from being poets. Or, because they aren't comfortable with written poetry, that puts them at a distance. But I think it is good to remember that the origins of the English word "poetry" can be traced back to the Greek poesis, meaning to create or put into action, and we are all capable of creating or putting something into action.

Poetry at Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York  [©Kevin Fleming/Corbis]

I also think of poetry as a quality in our lives, perhaps a quality of relating to other people. A kind of attentiveness that we are willing to pay to another person. A willingness to pay attention to what is going on around us, to bring a certain clarity, to truly listen to what a person is saying to us beneath the language that they are giving us: What is really troubling them? What do they really want to be doing with their lives?

So I think poetry is about the quality of attention as much as anything else. Perhaps the quality of intention as well. So in that sense I think we can all aspire to be poets, because each of us can bring that act of listening to each other. And also be looking for that quality of attention and intention in our own lives and help others discern that in themselves.

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