We Are All a Poet [by Timothy Green]

In my first post, I admitted that I’m not a poet—poetry has always felt, and still feels, like a hobby to me, even though I work professionally as a poetry editor. I’m probably not alone in that coming to this place, working in support of the arts, involved an existential dilemma. I genuinely love sitting in front of the blinking cursor in an empty word document at 3 a.m. and surprising myself with the leaps of imagination that flow out of my hands, as if the cells of my fingers magically know more about the world than I do. How do I justify that life, though? How is that anything other than self-absorption?

I’ve never really talked about this, but school always came so easy to me, and I’ve felt guilty about it for as long as I can remember. At 10 years old, I’d stay up past midnight reading Stephen King, and then sleep through classes that bored the hell out of me. I practiced postures that made it seem like I was awake, but hid my eyes, and I’d be day-dreaming or deep asleep. And still I never not got an A. We had “effort” grades in my school 1 – 5, and my goal throughout was always the A1: an A, but with an insulting lack of effort. I told my friends I knew answers through osmosis; I could tell what to choose on a multiple choice exam just by the wording of the options—and I still can. I told them I was psychic, that my family was a clandestine sect of precognitive magicians. My little brother had, what, 99.7% the same genome as me, and he had trouble reading Goosebumps. This was so unfair; I’ve never had to work at anything in my life, and I think that’s why I work so hard, just to make up for how I don’t have to.

The first thing I wanted to be was an architect, designing buildings and bridges to handle the largest load with the least materials. I loved drafting class, detailing the mind’s eye in a way that someone else could make real. But who cares about buildings and bridges? The Romans built bridges; bridges will be without me.

Somehow I got it in my head that molecular biology was the future—and it is the future … once we harness the power of cellular machines and molecular computers, we’re going to be living forever, rendering so many philosophical and practical questions moot. Guilt told me this was what I had to do, so I did it right: scholarship to a research university, work-study job in an mRNA lab setting up experiments. I was only an undergrad, I didn’t contribute anything, but I sat through all the meetings, and I remember clearly one day when the results came in and it worked: The lab had successfully predicted the three-dimensional structure of a protein strand. The post-doc presented the results, and it was high-fives all around, and I pretended, but I just didn’t care in the way that they cared, and I couldn’t fool myself.

Meanwhile, I was writing poems for James Longenbach in an elective poetry class, and I found the process so fascinating. I wrote a poem about fishing with my uncle at their cabin on the Finger Lakes—my hook had swung on the line and lodged itself in my nose, and that was exactly my family. A fish-hook in the skin doesn’t bleed until you yank it out. Where did metaphor come from? Did I always know it? I loved that question, and still love that question.

But I couldn’t give up science for something so ephemeral. I had to cure cancer or death or something else important enough to justify how lazy I felt.

And then I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on a random walk through the library stacks, and a single sentence changed my life. If I were a real poet, I’d have that line memorized by now, or at least a copy of the book on my shelf with a post-it note pasted to the page it appears. I’m not a real poet, though, so I don’t even own a copy and will have to paraphrase. It said something like, “All over the world, scientists are working to extend our lives, but none of them are asking why.” And that was me—Robert Pirsig wrote that sentence for me.

What is the point of life, but to explore it, and study it, and feel it? In that one moment it became clear, and it remains clear: Poetry is all that matters.

A poem is the moment’s zenith. It’s the bird’s eye view of all that is and all that might be. A poem is pratityasamutpada, the interdependently arising phenomena—the speaker becoming the listener, the listener becoming the speaker.

To put it less cryptically: Poems are the songs of our interconnectedness as human beings. They are simple empathy machines. They let us experience life more fully, let us understand each other more clearly, and put us in tune with our truest selves. A world full of poets is a world without war. It’s a world of understanding and imagination. Poetry is one of the great bulwarks resisting the apathy, the  homogenization, and the self-segregation of consumerist technology. Poetry is the medium of reflection and introspection, a balm against the pace of modern life. I imagine a world with 7 billion poets, and it’s a better world.

Is there any practice more worth working for?

I’ll leave it at that. Thanks for reading these five days. Thanks to Stacey Harwood for having me here, and a special shout out to Abby E. Murray for convincing me to do it. 

 

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[Photo by Gisela Giardino, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link]

Comments

[Robbi Nester]

I don't know what you mean when you say you "aren't a poet." You write poetry. You love poetry. You live for the stuff, so why aren't you a poet?

[Salik]

Robbi, he explains why he is not a poet here: http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2015/04/we-are-not-a-poet-by-timothy-green.html