Comfort Food

Poet's Petard for July 2022

Poetry is mostly known for its ability to excite, amuse and comfort. Right now, caught in a knot of history, with more than the average gut-punching controversies drawing down our emotional reserves, I would imagine people who normally never touch the stuff (poetry, I mean) are turning to poetry out of desperation. Yet, sometimes poetry's response to the agonizing cry “Is there Balm in Gilead?” is a resounding “Nope!” and the frown and kick to go with it. People are finding it unusually hard to develop into sane, compassionate, clear, humble and steadfast adults. How can we best make use of poetry to help us out?

I'd like to offer you a few quotations from my personal trove of “words that comfort me even if I don't know exactly why.”

This first one is a little nerdy, but every time I read it. . . .well, you'll see:

Definition of gravitational lensing:
“A cosmic situation which slightly alters the apparent shape of some celestial object
or cluster of objects.”

                                                (hint: it's the word “slightly” that does it:
I mean, if this is an “apparent shape,” not a firmly fixed one, then how the heck do you know
if it's altered at all, much less “slightly”? A little more precision here, scientists, please!)

Here are the opening lines of a poem by Wang Wei (701-761) translated by Florence Ayscough and
Amy Lowell:

“Every time I have started for the Yellow Flower River
I have gone down the Blue-Green Stream.”

                         (Is this a good thing, or not? I've read other translations of this poem
which sounded much more mundane. But here the words ring out as a kind of cheerful                              summary of a hugely revered and complex life.)

Here are three from my own collection of poetry orphans. I call “parentheses” because the only thing they share is a kind of incipient randomness, like a collection of tips of icebergs*

            1.         I passed Utopia
                        twice today. It was raining.
                        The dogs were in.
 
                        The sign on the fence is
                        blurred, as if the effort
                        has become too much
 
                        even if nobody can see
                        the kennels from the road,
                        or the burning bush.
 
            2.         Deep inside each human heart
                        molecules of air
                        transform themselves into molecules
                        of blood, millions of times each day
                        and back again
                        into a different kind of air.
                        Might this be a way to proceed?
 
            3.         Look! A mile straight down from the airplane window
                        across a field blazing with morning light
                        a small blue tractor is spilling darkness, row by row.
                        Such a relief!

*Footnote: Some poets have made up their own name for those groupings of words that don't quite get to 'hold down' a formal category. Mine has been “parentheses,” but others might be “studies,” “dispatches,”“monologues,” “perambulations,” “doors,” “liminals,” “short takes,” “centuries,” “conjugations.” Many poets make up their own forms as a kind of  temporary generating discipline,  Certain persona poems also serve this need –  to act as poetic “trellises” that offer support to ideas that would likely never emerge in any other way.