What does poetry mean?
If you think about in terms of art and in terms of love, it means to go beyond the prosaic. It goes beyond the pedestrian, or common, or that which seems to be the structured “norm.”
But it’s not exclusionary ”“ which is maybe what we felt 17th Century poetry was when we read it in high school and practically fell asleep. Why did those damn English writers use such big words, write in metre, use rhymes we never understood and basically make us feel like mere mortals compared to their transcendental musings?
And don’t get me started on haiku.
The poetry we’re talking about here is simply the poetry of being human. Of being alive. And how to engage our humanity more fully in everything we do. With patience and dignity and courage and grace.
Part of the challenge we face in the world is how we respond to challenges we face in the world. And one of the ways we seem to keep missing the mark is on our over-reaction to all things almost all the time.
Overstimulation creates a culture that’s rude and mean-spirited and treats people like concepts with no empathy or regard for feeling or tolerance.
We’re so reactive and reductive and objectifying ”“ so judging and segregating and fetishizing that we lose our connection to spirit.
There is a breath we share with all other living beings. I’m sharing this breath right now with all that lived before me and is right now. From Donald Trump (gasp!) to the birds in my garden to my friends all the way around the world in London or Tibet. As much as we don’t want to believe we’re connected, we are.
But we prefer to be divisive. (And to make ourselves feel better about our boring, meaningless, and uninspired lives ”“ we cruelly take other people down with us.)
We’re so obsessed with the media sensationalizing everything that we lose sight of what really matters. We get so caught up in the drama ”“ whether it’s the Kardashian-Swift-Kanye war or the Republican Convention ”“ we can’t create new conscious narratives; we’re constantly on autopilot, reacting unconsciously to things without any understanding of the underlying human condition. Or the total story. You can’t react to one side of it only.
“Make America Safe Again” is a slogan we hear a lot these days. But is it really any more unsafe than any other time? I mean, is it unsafe because of terrorism or is it unsafe because there are more than 300 million guns in the U.S.? Or “Make America Great Again.” Do we want to make it “great” like in the ’80s when people ignored the AIDS crisis and thousands of people died, or in the ’70s when women had to fight for their own basic reproductive rights or in the ’50s when racial segregation was the norm?
Immediately after the tragedy in Nice, France, people were actually filming the dead (and dying) bodies on the ground. On their iPhones. Is there no sacredness? Must we continuously demand that everything be constantly recorded so that our insatiable desire to consume is met?
We become desensitized to real suffering and real pain because our only engagement with it in the world comes from what we see on video screens and on TV and filtered through a phone.
We have to have conversations about possibilities of engaging with the world in non-reductive ways. Ways that allow us to be better humans rather than simply making our lives more convenient (at the expense of others), which in turn can make us lose our understanding of the real physics of life itself: patience, tolerance, peace, empathy, process.
Poetry.
Without it, we’re done for.