Educating for Change: How Poetry Prepares Us
Marilyn McEntyre | University of California, Berkeley
Delivered February 6, 2016
at the Fifteenth Annual Conversation on the Liberal Arts
Westmont College, Santa Barbara, CA
Marilyn McEntyre
UC Berkeley
[email protected]; [email protected]
Conversations on the Liberal Arts,
Gaede Institute, February, 2016
EDUCATING FOR CHANGE:
How Poetry Prepares Us
Which one of you, if a child asked you for bread, would give her a
poem? Or let’s say you gave her the bread. Would you still give her the poem?
Even if she didn’t ask? Even if she didn’t care? I’m here to suggest that we
offer bread in one hand and poems in the other to those we’re attempting to
equip for changes that will require all the wit and ingenuity we can gather, and
who will be called in new ways to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.
Kenneth Burke called literature “equipment for living.” His is one of my
favorite definitions of literature, and one I’m hoping to make more specific in
our time together by considering how literature—and more specifically
poetry—equips us and our students to live in the highly charged middle
ground between hope and despair—more highly charged even than what we
who grew up in the Cold War era had to face.
The changes needed now for human beings to survive and thrive and
share the planet are global and paradigmatic. How we think about nations,
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national economies, national security and national identity need to change as
the vested interests of multinational companies and the consequences of
environmental policies and trade agreements bleed across borders. New
diseases born by “killer bugs” make their way efficiently across those borders
by air travel and defy our whole arsenal of antibiotics. Privatization of public
services has contributed to massive inequities, requiring that we rethink and
redefine human rights and human community. Deepened political divisions
are reflected in faith communities where schisms multiply. The sheer scale on
which we are challenged to reimagine the common good stretches the heart
and imagination in historically unprecedented ways.
Those facts, and the focus of this conference, if we take them seriously,
challenge us all to rethink both our methods and our purposes as educators.
“Social Transformation” if we are to accomplish it with focus and integrity,
requires the humility to lay aside theoretical predispositions and professional
agendas long enough to talk with students about their concerns, their fears,
their curiosities, their confusions, and then to take careful stock of the specific
challenges they will be facing over the coming decade and beyond, including
the effects of climate change on economies and ecosystems; increasingly
desperate competition for food, clean water, fuel, and money to repair
crumbling infrastructures; diminishing accountability among the “über-rich”
who control large bandwidths of the media, manufacturing, and food
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production; deepening and dangerous misunderstandings among people of
faith.
My 12-year-old grandson recently observed of his much younger cousin,
“Hannah won’t have to get her license when she’s 16.” His thought was that
cars would be driving themselves by then. Mine was that driving might be an
option only for the very affluent. “Maybe,” I mused, adding hopefully
(keeping my skepticism to myself), “perhaps she won’t need to because there
will be more adequate public transportation that runs on solar energy.” His
vision of the future and mine rested on very different assumptions. An
important part of what we do with students every day is get them to examine
their assumptions. And we need to keep examining ours and measuring them
against prophecy, science, the daily news, and whatever answers we hear
“blowing in the wind” as we try to remain tuned in to both the spirit of the
times and the Spirit that moves through our timebound lives from before and
after time itself.
Educating for change requires that we keep the notions of “equipping”
and “equipment” at the center of our efforts. Equipping is not simply a
pragmatic matter. It involves skill sets and methods of problem-solving, but
also inventive, ad hoc ways of fostering imagination, empathy, compassion,
agile intelligence, resistance to mindless orthodoxies, and practice of mindful
attention to the signs of the times, some of them subtle: how energy is
generated and distributed; what systems are failing; who ends up in prisons;
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where gardens flourish and who tends them; where boundaries blur; where
violence occurs; what practical peacemaking entails.
Educating for change requires specificity of focus. Abstractions like
“justice,” “poverty,” “renewal,” “mission,” or even “climate change” need to be
anchored in strategies and methods. Abstractions are a constant temptation to
those who speak in public: they’re convenient ways of creating deniability,
fostering a false but usable consensus, postponing confrontation and avoiding
the complexities of troublesome facts. Specificity is one of the hardest-won
features of reliable public discourse. Over my years of teaching writing courses
I’ve scribbled “Be more specific” in more margins than I care to remember, and
with growing urgency. What I have learned from that rather tedious repetition
is how hard it is to be specific—how much homework it requires, how much
tolerance for ambiguities and inconvenient complicating factors that modify
one’s claims, how much more attention to verbs and nouns that actually name,
point, and enable one take all the steps of a process or costs of a product into
account, as well as purposes and effects.
So how does an English teacher educate for change? To teach literature
to the rising generation is to have to answer a question I’ve addressed in
various ways on many occasions: Why read a poem at a time like this?
These days I read poetry with medical students, and have reframed that
question for their needs, sending them into their first weeks of hospital work
with the question, “Why read a poem in a place like this?” Danielle Ofri, MD
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recently wrote a piece about how she integrates poetry into her instruction of
interns right at the bedside, sometimes distributing copies of a poem to both
the patient and the baffled young practitioners and inviting them all to read it
together before continuing their rounds.i In an essay about that work, she
mentions a patient who smells of “unwashed socks and cheap beer.” I love the
precision of that image. It reminds me of sitting uncomfortably next to a man
recently whose skin looked like bark and whose body smelled a little like last
night’s dishes. I think about how other doctors have written about the moment
when a smell gives them the diagnostic information they need. About how
valuable the smell of urine, the smell of skin, the smell of a patient’s breath, the
smell of an infant’s first feces are to practitioners who are unafraid to notice
and name the rude olfactory data most of us avoid mentioning.
Ofri’s piece about bringing poems into clinical encounters doesn’t prove
anything, but it does suggest how poems can disrupt and reframe an occasion
normally circumscribed by institutional protocols. Everyone gathered at the
bedside—as well as the one in it--reads a poem and suddenly something
happens. The patient is affirmed. The students are uncomfortable. And
everyone, she writes, is “an equal neophyte.” Though poetry anxiety is a
common condition, poems, she believes, and I agree, have a democratizing
effect when they’re good ones. The good ones offer even unpracticed readers,
even resistant readers, some shock of recognition that brings them to terms
with something true—a feeling, a memory, a fear, a sudden insight.
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The place of poetry in medicine has been much discussed since the field
of “medical humanities” began to emerge on the academic landscape in the
1980s. The talking points for including it in medical training are well
established and persuasive. But it still, no doubt, comes as a surprise when a
doctor distributes and reads a poem at a patient’s bedside. Inside a classroom
we can all engage in decorous reflection. At a bedside, gazing together at a
poem produced in odd, untimely fashion from the pocket of a white coat, one
has time only to see, feel, and, if called upon, say what comes up—to witness,
as it were, to what the poem did, not to analyze how it did it. How it did it
often comes down to a deft image or a line break or a turn of phrase or simply
the unabashed naming of something like smells.
All students, not just med students, need a more specific answer to
“Why read a poem” than “Because it inspires,” or “humanizes,” or even
because it is, as Matthew Arnold put it, among “the best that has been thought
and said.” They want, and need, and deserve to know why it’s worth the time
it takes—and it does take time—to read a poem closely, wrestle with words
and meanings, dwell in its gaps, entertain possibilities, allow associations to
impinge and line-breaks to disrupt. They need to know how poems might
equip them to live in the world they’re getting.
What I have to say about poetry hereafter applies to all good literature—
to novels like Absalom Absalom! and Moby-Dick, to plays like Antigone and
Hamlet and Waiting for Godot, and to rich nonfiction like Annie Dillard’s or
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Wendell Berry’s or William Bryant Logan’s or Arundhati Roy’s. “Why read a
poem?” is a question about the value of word-work, wordsmithing, word
husbandry, if you like—what it avails us to pause for a long, hard, thoughtful
look at the words we live by and exchange like the currency we carry, folded
and mutilated, in our pockets.
So here are some answers to the “Why read” question:
1) Poetry prepares us for complex problem solving.
In an article analyzing the process of complex problem-solving, Andreas
Fischer and his colleagues define complex problems as those that concern
“systems that contain many highly interrelated elements,” and outline several
important skills all complex problem-solving entails:
1) information generation (gathering all the data that might prove relevant)
2) information reduction (organizing the data in ways that enable useful
analysis)
3) model building (coming up with a sample or method)
4) dynamic decision making (making judgments about what is of most value
and to whom) and
5) evaluation (reflecting on the process and its potential effects).
Reading and writing poetry involves all of these. Arriving at a valid reading of
a text engages us in interpretive work that sends us outward into history,
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cultural studies, linguistics, literary theory, music, rhetoric, and sometimes
science, medicine, and math. This inherently interdisciplinary process is a form
of what the aforementioned social scientists rather inelegantly term
“information generation.” Good poems also invite us inward, sometimes
surprising us into reflection on our own psychological predispositions,
sensibilities, values, beliefs, and places of pain. Good reading requires that we
choose and pursue “a” reading, recognizing it as one among many
hermeneutical pathways, since multiple readings of a rich text are always
possible. A Marxist reading, a feminist reading, a Christian reading, a
psychoanalytic reading, a linguistic analysis, at its best would avoid
reductionism, but each does “reduce” certain variables in order to frame the
problems the poem poses in a given set of terms. What Fischer et al describe as
“model building” may be recognized in the process of putting together a
reading that is plausible, instructive and elegant, and that opens up a way of
appreciating and accessing the value of the poem that might not have been
evident to the naïve reader. This is the work of the literary critic—a social
agent whose services are still valued by readers of the New York Times, the New
Yorker, The London Review, and Books and Culture. The “dynamic decision
making” that follows the work of arriving at a viable reading is the stage of
considering how, when, and with whom to share the insights that emerge from
a particular reading. (Undergraduates generally have this decision made for
them, in the form of often unwelcome and sometimes overprescribed
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assignments.) Finally, “evaluation” may entail (and should, in a good
assignment) some narrative of process that enables the reader and/or writer to
identify and enjoy the satisfactions the poem has provided and consider its
relevance to spiritual growth, social, political or psychological awareness, or
linguistic fluency, for example.
So engagement with texts, especially with poetic texts that condense and
distill (rather than straining out ambiguities for the sake of ready access to a
“convenient truth”) activate both sides of the brain and bring them into
dialogue. (In recognition of this fact, the med students in our program have
entitled their literary blog “Corpus Callosum”—an in-joke that will likely be
lost on some readers, but in which they take some pleasure.) Good close
reading involves consideration of multiple factors: social and personal contexts
of both reader and speaker; conventions of poetic discourse; how meaning is
malleable and negotiated; how the figurative and the literal intersect; how
words function within, so to speak, their own magnetic fields, with varying
valence and charge; how the poem itself occupies a dynamic field of public and
private discourse, and so on. Variables multiply the more closely you read.
And ambiguities are not, as in empirical science or engineering, to be dispelled
but rather celebrated as adding to the richness of the possibilities the poem, as
Emily Dickinson puts it, invites us to dwell in. “I dwell in possibility,” she
writes, and adds with justifiable allegiance to her calling, “a fairer house than
prose.”
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2) Poetry disrupts syntax and conventional logic.
That is to say, a poem, and even good prose, challenges the constraints
of the language we live in, inviting us to step outside its most common
conventions and explore unorthodox possibilities, playing with word order
and the devices that define relationship, provide closure, or distinguish nouns
from verbs (a distinction some atomic physicists might find a little too
simplistic).
Lyric poetry emphasizes epiphany rather than narrative as a way of
arriving at insight or resolution. In academic cultures that privilege rational,
sequential thinking (or at least the semblance of it), a good poem reminds us
how our conceptual frame may suddenly shift and a different constellation of
meaning emerge from the same data. As Howard Nemerov points out, poems
are in this way like jokes, both of them instruments of sudden insight.
Poems offer an alterative to cause-effect reasoning and invite us to reflect on
other ways in which things are connected. They invite us to suspend for a time
the need for conclusiveness in order to notice what happens in the syntactic
gaps at the end of the poetic line, or in the associative leap or in the space
between stanzas.
Ezra Pound, poet and wild-eyed poetic theorist, famously observed in
introduction to Ernest Fenellosa’s controversial pamphlet The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry, that Westerners had a great deal to gain by
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studying Asian languages and cultures. “The duty that faces us,” he writes, “is
not to batter down their forts or to exploit their markets, but to study and to
come to sympathize with their humanity and their generous aspirations.” He
proposed to do this by means of poetry. He saw in a Chinese ideograph a
“vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature,” speaking “at once with
the vividness of painting and with the mobility of sounds.” Later he makes the
startling assertion that
A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are
only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions,
cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure
verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun
and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the
Chinese conception tends to represent them.
Important critiques have been leveled against Pound and Fenellosa for the
theories they ventured about the dangers of prescriptive grammar and what
Pound recognized in both the dying British and expanding American empires
as linguistic imperialism. They, like George Orwell and later George Steiner
were deeply concerned with the politics of language. They recognized
language as an instrument of power, and poets as the people most able to
challenge abuses of that power. They also understood that all poets are
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translators: any effort to bring experience with all its nuance,
multidirectionality, subtlety, and idiosyncrasy to common speech involves
consequential work of translation: strategic substitution, reduction, selection,
condensation. What we call poetic devices have evolved to help accomplish
this task.
To consider poetic devices in the way Pound and other theorists of
poetry do is to recognize them as attempts to represent something true about
how things are. Representing the truth is always a tricky task: there is, as one
poet wrote of love, “no single way it can be told.” None of us can achieve the
Archimedean vantage point, but poetic devices allow us avenues of access to
what we experience, intuit, or observe that complement, and are sometimes
more adequate than rational analysis. To see how they do that, let’s briefly
consider a few of the most common of them.
Hyperbole, for instance (not the thoughtless hyperbole now so pervasive
in post-adolescent media-speak, but hyperbole chosen for its arresting effect)
can jar us into reconsidering the dimensions of time, space, cost in new terms.
And the new terms come upon us with the force of surprise, as in any number
of Shakespeare’s final couplets, like this one:
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
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There is irony as well as hyperbole in those lines, the more effective
because it takes a second glance to see it. Irony (also pervasive in American
humor and sub-humorous banter) can, at its best, unmask pretense and direct
us toward the paradoxes that are foundation stones of every wisdom tradition.
These lines from W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” for instance, turn irony to
prophetic purposes that even now maintain their political urgency:
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
As in many of his poems, the light and lilting rhythm contributes to the
deepening irony of the images, and we are reminded of Shelley’s argument that
poetry “purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity.”
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Analogy and metaphor enable us to reframe what we see in terms that
reorganize conventional sensibilities and assumptions, some of which need to
be unmasked and questioned. When Mary Oliver begins a poem entitled
“Vultures,” for instance, with the lines
Like large dark
lazy
butterflies they sweep over
the glades looking
for death,
to eat it,
to make it vanish,
to make of it the miracle:
resurrection...
The startling comparison of vultures to butterflies immediately disrupts
aesthetic categories and foregrounds something true about both species. That
commitment to biological vision is reiterated in the second analogy between
the eating and digestion of carrion and the natural processes that turn animal
feces to soil and resurrection—a word appropriation that some might feel
borders on sacrilege in order to make a radical point. That point is, in part, to
give us eyes to see process rather than object—to see the visible world as
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dynamic and fluid rather than static and stable, to see things as verbs rather
than nouns. This is a profound challenge to the analytical categories most of us
regard as normal. Good poetry helps free us from what has been called “the
tyranny of the normal.”
Metaphor, simile and analogy as habits of mind foster the habit of seeing
things in the various and beautiful web of relationship in which we all live and
move and have our being. Henry James saw this work of revision as central to
the writer’s vocation: “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere,” he wrote,
“and the exquisite problem of the artist is . . . to draw, by a geometry of his own,
the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.” In other words the
literary work—the poem, we will say—frames what it invites us to see, but in
such a way as to invite us also to recognize the frame itself as a device
contingent on choice.
James, like Pound and Eliot and many before them invite us to explore
the rich and life-giving properties of language even as we recognize, as Eliot
wryly lamented, that
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
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Will not stay still.
Poetry makes us look at language, not just through it--at how it works and how
it shapes how we see what we see. It helps us maintain a critical distance on
our own discourses, rendering us less susceptible to propaganda, mindless
hyperbole and other features of corrupted commercial and political discourse.
If we have learned well what poetry has to teach, we will not be able to hear
words like “collateral damage” or “national security” or “peacekeeping forces”
or “clinically proven” or “advancement” without some reflection on the
purposes of euphemism, the evasiveness of passive constructions, or the lack of
a meaningful referent.
3. Poetry changes the way we inhabit time.
In his book, Time Wars, in a chapter entitled “The Nanosecond Culture,”
Jeremy Rifkin cites examples of the ways we speed up to accommodate the
increasing speed at which our technologies process information and constantly
redirect our attention. He also develops a compelling and disturbing argument
about the consequences of increasing momentum in human transactions and
thought processes driven by the sound byte and the commodification of time.
Poetry slows us down when most forces in the culture are encouraging
us to speed up. A good poem has an undertow; it will tug you backwards to
reconsider even as it moves you forward. Even protest poems by politically
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engaged poets invite us to contemplation as the ground of right action. The
opening lines of Juliana Spahr’s poem, “Responding,” for instance, put visible
obstacles in our way as we make our slow way toward the conclusion of a
sentence repeatedly disrupted by brackets and asides that divert our attention
from “content” to “form” and link the two in a Moebius strip of meaning:
I
This is a place without a terrain a government that always
changes an unstable language. Even buildings disappear
from day to day.
[gendered pronoun] wanders in this place
[searching
[waiting
the condition of unbearableness is the constant state of mind
for all occupants
we read all day in the village square during the rule of [name
of major historical figure] a book that is so subtle
[its political content goes unnoticed
what is political content?
[the question or the statement
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[gender pronoun] creates
[a reader culture
[generic plural pronoun] prefer both
When I teach reading, I return repeatedly to the instruction to “go in before you
go on”—pause over any word or phrase that calls itself to your attention and
consider why you noticed it. What came up there? What wisp of feeling or
memory did it evoke that might deserve a moment’s reflection? In this poem
Spahr urges us to reflect on a politically exploited and often exploitive common
language even as we use it—to maintain, in other words, a critical and ironic
distance on our politicized discourses simultaneously with the passionate care
for it that makes it worth a poet’s time.
In Space, Time and Medicine Larry Dossey raises a daring question for a
medical doctor who works in a culture of capitalistic “evidence-based
medicine”: “Do we make ourselves sick by conforming to an idea of a strict
linear time composed of a rigid succession of future, past, and present?” The
answer he offers and develops with a remarkable succession of examples is
this: “I am convinced that we can destroy ourselves through the creation of
illness by perceiving time in a linear, one-way flow.”ii If poetry has a healing
function, that power to heal lies partly in recalling us from that rigid and rapid
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succession that diverts our energies from the present moment we are called to
inhabit.
4. “Poetry is the opposite of war.”
In her thoughtful article, “Singing About the Dark Times: Poetry and
Conflict,”iii written five costly years into the Iraq war, Sarah Maguire, poet and
translator, raises the same question I have raised here: why write, read, or
translate poetry in desperate times that call not only for desperate measures,
but for practical, innovative, highly skilled ones? “Beside these horrors,” she
writes, “poetry, whether ‘political' poetry that addresses the conflict head on,
or poetry that's concerned with intimate, ‘personal' matters, can seem utterly
irrelevant.” She takes on the much-misread line from W.H. Auden’s superb
tribute, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” “Poetry makes nothing happen.” The
troubling line is often misunderstood because it is so often taken out of context.
In the ensuing lines, he insists that what poetry does is “survive” as “a way of
happening, a mouth.” It isn’t exactly the work of the poet, explicitly political or
otherwise, to make things happen, but to mirror, sometimes to prophesy, to
give language to suffering and rage and hope, and, as Eliot put it in the course
of that to “purify the dialect of the tribe.” That task is tantamount to
sharpening what is arguably the strongest weapon we have as a stay against
confusion. And it may be wrong to call it a weapon at all; if Maguire is right, it
is, rather, a ploughshare: “Translating poetry is the opposite of war,” she
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writes. And I believe her claim can be widened to say simply that poetry is the
opposite of war.
By inviting us into the intimate space of a speaker’s mind and heart, into
a political point of view that has been submitted to the dedicated lapidary work
of a wordsmith who knows he or she is honing instruments of power, into
sentence structures that sometimes reconfigure our most cherished habits of
mind, poems allow us not only to comprehend, but for a time to inhabit a
perspective we might be inclined to judge and dismiss. Once you have
consented to the experience a poem offers it modifies, if only slightly, your
mood, memory, taste, and judgments, the cadences and pace of your
conversation. If all it does is slow us down, reroute the energy that fuels our
fear into intense concern for what distinguishes one word from another, or
make us notice as Li Young-Lee does, that “The birds don’t alter space, / they
reveal it . . .” poems open a space in which peacemaking can begin to happen.
Some poets, like Wilfred Owen, Wendell Berry, Carolyn Forché, or Carolyn
Kizer speak for peace with the fierce forthrightness of prophets. And some,
whose purposes appear far less political, who write like Mary Oliver about
mornings in Blackwater Woods or like Jane Kenyon about learning to live her
final illness, teach peace by modeling the occupations of a peaceful mind,
teaching us to see and feel the value of the thing at hand with such persuasive
clarity, we are moved to cherish and protect what we might otherwise
overlook.
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In “After an Illness, Walking the Dog,” Kenyon writes of her dog,
In a frenzy of delight
he runs away up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.
The lines allow us not only to imagine but to participate in the delight an
innocent being takes in the gifts of the natural world. They also invite us
to remember a word like “freshets” and to remember how light falls on
pebble and leaf, pervasive light made specific in one small thing. They
slow the eye and open the heart to the ache it will be left with in the midst
of all that threatens this beauty. How can we learn to care for the earth’s
creatures, for the animals, the trees, the poor, the vulnerable, the powerful
who have lost their way, the confused, those we counsel and teach, those
we learn from, if we are not induced regularly to direct our gaze long and
willingly to the specificity of their lives? Poets direct us, and poetry
prepares us for the dark times in which the singers may be the only ones
with oil for their lamps.
You never know what you’re being prepared for, I have said often to
students, to my children, to my husband as he makes his way through the early
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months of retirement, to myself as I wonder what’s next. We do know what we
need to prepare for if we are attentive to the global problems I rehearsed at the
beginning of this talk. We don’t know, any one of us, what our part in those
great transitions may be, what experiments we may be part of, or what we may
be called upon to endure. But since we are in the business of educating people
for the changes already imminent, it behooves us to think deeply together
about what “equipment for living” may be most necessary if, like Frodo, we are
called upon to undertake a dangerous journey, though we do not know the
way. William Sloane Coffin, one of the great public voices that rose against
U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, recommended that everyone read a poem a day.
William Carlos Williams, who spent his career providing medical care to the
immigrant poor stayed up to write poems between midnight and 3 a.m., and
insisted that, though it is “difficult to get the news from poems,” “men die
every day for lack of what is found there.” Mary Oliver, an introvert who has
spent much of her life avoiding institutions and the public square, wandering
in the woods, observing birds and lilies, speaks to overflow audiences around
the country who recognize in her poems something we all need. The people
who buy those tickets share in the wisdom of Erasmus, who famously said,
“When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and
clothes.”
People who can read poetry well have learned to look closely and long
at what they see and honor its complexities. They know how to think
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metaphorically, tolerate ambiguity, recognize the extent to which meaning is
made, not just given, and read creatively and critically. They care about
language and respect its power. They will not easily be duped, or persuaded
by propaganda. They are discerning listeners, and make their judgments with
deliberation. We need them in boardrooms and pulpits and on the floor of
Congress and in labs and labor unions. While they are our students, it is our
responsibility to help them hear and cherish and remember lines that may one
day be lifelines for them.
Einstein said (and is quoted these days on many a T-shirt) “Imagination
is more important than knowledge.” It is our privilege to furnish and make fit
the imaginations those students, and we, will need to meet resourcefully and
resiliently a future where fewer species live in smaller forests and water and
weather are less predictable and paradigmatic change is no longer avoidable.
For those changes we need people who live in a blessed state of what one
physicist called “radical amazement.” I think that term is another way of
saying lively and intelligent hope fueled by capacious and capable poetic
imagination.
i
Danielle Ofri, “The Poetry Ward,” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178455,
originally published July 10, 2006.
ii
Larry Dossey, MD, Space, Time and Medicine (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Press,
1982) p. 21.
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iii
Sarah Maguire, “Singing About the Dark Times: Poetry and Conflict,” Poetry
Translation Center (http://www.poetrytranslation.org/articles/singing-about-the-darktimes-poetry-and-conflict), March 13, 2008.