Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

There are “some people” who wonder why I do this weekly series on poetry. The readership isn’t large, although I am often surprised by who shows up, and the home country from which they are visiting. I’m passionate about the written word in all its forms, but poetry has that certain something more for me.

So I was delighted to find this quote by today’s featured poet,  C.D. Wright (1949-2016):

“Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball’s chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so—go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry—without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Tranströmer * broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco:

We got dressed and showed the house
You live well the visitor said
The slum must be inside you.

If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most ‘stunned by existence,’ the most determined to redeem the world in words. . .”

― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

* Tomas Tranströmer, the wonderful Swedish poet 

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