That’s the question Tricia Knoll‘s poetry group responded to just before she read my introductory post from last month. She thought it was a pretty cool segue from her group’s question to this blog’s title—Learning To Love The Questions—and she was nice enough to take the time to write me about it. I also thought that it was a pretty cool segue, and since her group’s question is an important one, I asked her if she and any other of her group members would be willing to share what they wrote in response so I could share it here. Here’s Tricia’s:

The Poem We Need

Shrill? Screaming shrill? But Howl can never be done again. Meditative? Like Chinese poets on a path to mountain top from pine forest who only need a scrap of paper, ink, wine, a dry hut, and memories of a distant friend. But that’s best saved for Saturday nights with barley bean soup inside and winter winds outside. What about a poem mimicking a train rocking over rails and blasting horns at treacherous crossings? We’re at that crossing. Stopped, waiting for the train to pass. Acting as if all futures down the rails have a tidy station with ticket masters and redcaps to assist stragglers. As I count cars, I observe the farm stand to the east with a cow for kids to pet and racks of local honey, bergamot soap and unshucked corn. But that cornfield withers under a grayish sky smeared with wildfire smoke. I remember a freight train horn as a kid one hot summer night, far from this crossing, across another cornfield. How it lulled me to sleep. Niggling question: what makes sleep come easier tonight?

I appreciate the way this poem moves from an almost panicky rage—”Screaming shrill?”— through a series of scenarios that become not less urgent, but more specific and localized, arriving finally at a question that, it seems to me, gets at the heart of one of things poems can do for us. By giving form to our anger, our fear, our helplessness—by naming those feelings in all their complexity—poems can make it easier to cope on a daily basis, which includes making it easier to sleep at night. (Tricia’s book, Wild Apples, was published by Fernwood Press in 2023. She also has a chapbook, The Unknown Daughter, which is available from Finishing Line Press.)

§§§

Ruth Farmer sent me a poem that I especially appreciate for the way it calls poets to be responsible and accountable to the art of poetry itself. Given the urgency of the myriad crises and concerns to which poets these days rightly feel called to respond, it’s easy to forget that craft matters, that form matters, because it is in working the forms that we find what Samuel Taylor Coleridge said poetry is: “The best words in the best order.” (The irony that Farmer’s poem is in free verse is not lost on me, though that irony itself speaks to the need she articulates. She does not claim that her poem is the poem we need, though in some ways it is. Rather, she uses this poem to name the poems she thinks we need, and those poems are overwhelmingly formal. And I also need to add, of course, that good free verse no less well-crafted than a well-crafted sonnet.)

What is the Poem We Need for Right Now?
 
An elegy filled with tears that fall on soil
composted with lost dreams, doom-scrolling,
hopes for a future of good things that keep getting
further and further away.

An ode to courage.
A sonnet of love for what’s right,
vehemence for what’s wrong,
filled with knowledge of what these words mean.

This world needs a limerick
full of foolish combinations of phrases,
so foolish we get our sense of humor back.
(Did we ever have one in the U. S. of A?)

This world needs sestinas, ghazals, pantoums and villanelles,
something with form that curbs the wild emotions
broadcast on social media, something
to make sense of nonsensical thoughts.

We do not need free verse, or American versions of haikus
that are not haikus at all.
(How hard can it be to write a seventeen syllable poem? 
I mean really!)

Let’s have no more patriot songs, war songs, and other
odes to death and destruction.

This world needs poems about love
and its many shapes and colors.

 Is it too late to write them?
Do we even have the words?

§§§
 
I don’t know if the title of Leigh Gavin Harder’s response is something she wrote after reading my introductory post or if it is a happy serendipity that the two are so closely connected, but either way it made me smile in recognition of a shared impulse.

I too love the questions 

the hover of dust motes in a ray of sun
sediment suspended in pond water
lives and lives held in stasis

Two poets spoke about what 
we need these days
elusive and winged always
just beyond what we can
touch

In their ramble
they concluded that the world
will only be saved by poets

Not the honeyed-hope ones
but those writing through tears
gritted teeth blood stained hands
still amazed

Still dazzled and stirred
by all the questions raised
held constant
seemingly rooted

But in actuality 
adrift in constant motion

This poem, like Knoll’s, takes a metaphorical tack in approaching its subject. The first three lines in particular are worth pondering in that regard, but what jumped out at me most is the conclusion the two poets talking about “what/we need these days” come to: “that the world/will only be saved by poets.” It put me in mind of W. H. Auden’s famous line from “In Memory of W. B. Yeats:” For poetry makes nothing happen, which is all too often taken out of context:

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

“[P]oetry makes nothing happen,” Auden says, but “it survives.” More than that, it is “A way of happening, a mouth.” Whatever poetry is, in other words, it is not inert. Following Auden’s metaphor, it “happens” in the same way that a river happens, and in the same way that the mouth of a river opens onto something larger than the itself, an ocean for example, so does the “mouth” of poetry. So does a question. You can see here the thread that is going to run through this blog.

As an example of a poem that opens onto a question that opens onto precisely the kind of reflecting on the state of the world that I think we need today, I’d like to invite you to engage with Elisa Gabbert’s close reading in The New York Times of another Auden poem, “Musée Des Baux Arts,” which is nominally a response to Breughel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus:

A summary of the poem does not do it justice, but it is about the fact that Icarus’s fall, which Auden uses to represent human suffering on a much larger scale, is a minor, insignificant part of the painting that you would easily miss if the title didn’t tell you to look for it: the legs sticking out of the water in the lower right hand corner are Icarus’. The suffering of others, the painting suggests, is something we have to choose to pay attention to because we can choose to look away from it all too easily. Here are the first few lines:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

And here are the lines specifically referencing Breughel’s painting:

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure;

Gabbert’s digital tour through the poem is well worth paying close attention to. She makes the poem’s underlying mechanics visible and accessible and shows how Auden constructed them—a la Ruth Farmer’s point above—to arrive at the poem’s “meaning.” She also illuminates and deepens our understanding of the poem’s ekphrastic nature by uncovering paintings it refers to in addition to the one Auden names. What struck me most, however, and made me want to include her article here is the way her analysis arrives at this:

“Musée des Beaux Arts”…offers no comforting slogans or rallying cries, no assurance that suffering comes to an end or happens for a reason…What the poem really does is ask questions. The truth, we might infer, cannot be told — the truth is always changing; the truth is an ongoing inquiry…It asks us to question our place in the world — to ask what we might be missing…Do we spare a thought for…suffering, or sail calmly on? Moral absolution is available, the poem seems to say. That doesn’t mean we deserve it.

We often ask what good poems can do in the face of the suffering inflicted, for example, by Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or the famine in Sudan—not to mention the Trump administration’s attacks on migrants, women, and people who are trans and queer. (That list could, obviously, go on.) Gabbert’s essay, it seems to me, offers one answer to that question. Poems, good poems—in both the aesthetic and moral/ethical sense—offer us emotional and intellectual access to the complex interiority of what it means that we have a choice in bearing witness, or not, to suffering, much less in taking, or not, whatever action we can to end it. Gabbert’s essay is worth reading and talking about and I think it is especially worth teaching.