Poetry as Survival

6. The Two Survivals

CHAPTER SIX The Two Survivals I don't believe that poetry can save the world. I do believe that the forces in us wish to share something of our experience by turning it into something and giving it to somebody: that is poetry. That is some kind of saving thing, and as far as my life is concerned, poetry has saved meq again and again. MURIEL RUKEYSER Risk is involved when a lyric poet feels and expresses emotion or writes about a disturbing experience. An instability accompanies the project. But instability isbuilt into the inner workings of our consciousness, and it isomnipresent in the externalworld also. The difference between a lyric poet and a person who does not write poems is that the poet has an arena in which to focus his or her encounter with disorder. And the poet's struggle to engage disorder with the ordering powers of imagination and the cultural tool of language leads to a sense of having mastered subjectivityand restabilized the self. What's more, every encounter with disorder of any sort thatresults in a poem is a successful encounter in the most basic sense we can mean it—namely, the poet survived. The very fact of the poem's existence on the page isproof of its efficacy for survival,proof that the poet succeededin ordering his or her disorder (ifonly briefly); proof a person could take on the thematic disorder of that particular poem (even the theme of madness) and order it. If the poet had failed or perished in the attempt, we would not be reading his or her poem. It's that simple and that strangelylovely. 83 84 THE SELF, JEOPARDY, AND SONG Of course, someone rushes forward and says, "Fine, but a month later the poet committed suicide." So what? We don't say planes can't fly because planes occasionally crash. People commit suicide with sadfrequency, but such an act isnot correlated with their being poets. Quite the contrary, all the testimony from poets is that the ordering powers of lyric poetry have given them precious resources to encounter the jeopardies and disorders that assail allhumans. Connecting The plucked chord performs its natural duty: it sounds! It calls for an echo from one that feels alike. j. G. VON HERDER, "Essay on the Origin of Language" The voice of the solitary Who makes others less alone. STANLEY KUNITZ, "Revolving Meditation" The lyric poem's primary victory is scored for the poet him- or herself. Writingthe poem helped her to survive, helped him to live. This initial personal triumph is followed by the extension of the poem into the larger social world of readers and audience, where the second survival power is made manifest. Readers are only "saved" by poems that enter deeply into them, and this happens when sympathetic identification of reader with writer takes place. The history of the idea of sympathy is central to the rise of the personal lyric in the West in the eighteenth century, but it's too vast and complex to elaborate here. Still, we should note that Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), sees sympathy as the bridge of imagination that connects up separate embodied selves and thus is the basis of all morality. And Rousseau announces, "How are we moved to pity? By getting outside ourselves and identifying with a being who suffers"; and, "He who imagines nothing is aware only of himself; he is isolated in the midst of mankind" ("Essay on the Origin of Language," i?55)- This imaginative ability to identify ourselves with other people isnot only the The Two Survivals 85 moral touchstone of humanism but also the psychological mechanism underlying all lyric efficacy. Few grasped this fact as deeply as Whitman, who opens his great lyric sequence "Song of Myself" with a basic solicitation of the readers sympathetic identification: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. "Become me," urges Whitman, become the "I" of this poem for this poem's duration. Only then will its wonders and powers be revealed to you and become a part of you. And William Carlos Williams, at the beginning of his book Spring and All (1923), negotiates directly and intimately with his readers about what will happen next: "In the imagination, we are from henceforth (so long as...