17 Here is the part about poetry saving your life.
I’m uncomfortable with laying claim to saviors or redemptive narrations: poetry didn’t necessarily save my life as much as poetry made my life. Poetry is life to me. There are times when I can’t distinguish between the hunger, the X, and the object I’ve enchanted with words.[1] The urge to write a poem, to set up a few cycles where Y dances with X, and X changes the sky, and Y, in turn, is illumined by it—is complicated by the urge to explain how this sort of revealing differs from exposing, and how revelation changes the world as we make it.
Rainer Maria Rilke said there was nothing greater than the hunger to write poetry. One must change one’s life in relation to it. I’m not the first or the only human to whom Rilke said this, of course. He said this to others. Rilke keeps saying this to humans and that is what makes him great.
“Young, hungry, I was searching within the limits of time and place and sex, for words to match and name desire,” said Adrienne Rich of her early enchantment with Rilke. At twenty-two, Rich knew “that for me poetry wasn’t enough as something to be appreciated, finely fingered: it could be a fierce, destabilizing force, a wave pulling you further out than you thought you wanted to be. You have to change your life.”[2]
Poetry demands the impossible: it asks us to read the caesuras.
- "Satisfaction is overrated anyway, I think, and it's an American idea that one ought to feel full in order to be satisfied," Sarah Manguso said in an interview with Wildness. ↵
- Adrienne Rich, "Not How to Write Poetry, But Wherefore" (Essential Essays: Culture Politics and the Art of Poetry, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert) ↵