Opening up to poetry is opening up to the world
& opening up to the world is opening up to poetry
Yesterday I was out in the park catching some sun. The sun has become something precious—more precious—since moving further North of the Equator. Since watching a documentary about how plants spin sunlight (i.e. starlight) into sugar. Since learning how they keep us alive with fresh air and with the gift of their lives. (As a side note to a digression, if you haven’t already read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, go read it!)
Before I get fully into waxing poetic about the sun, let’s return to the park. I was in the park catching some sun. I had on a pair of denim shorts in 19°C/66°F weather so my sun-starved skin could get a little life back. I had not prepared for the wind. The other sunbathers didn’t seem to mind, but my subtropical body did. And as my poetic body is wont to do in its growing seasons, a line of poetry—a complaint about the wind—sang itself into existence.
As I began to spin the first lines of a poem in my head, I made eye contact with a big golden retriever holding his own leash in his mouth. Pretending not to hear his human companion’s admonishments, he trotted up to me and sniffed at my hand, and then my open notebook. His companion called to him more firmly this time, “Come, Hercules!” (what a name!!) and this time he listened. To my amusement and wonder, his wet nose and mouth had left a broad streak across the page.
If this all sounds very mundane, it’s because it is. Delightful, too, but mundane. In a conversation about Queer Kinship, Writing Trauma, and Vulnerability on Poetry Vlog, C. R. Grimmer asks 陳琛 Chen Chen:
CRG: What’s been coming up a lot for me when I chat with other poets is everyone feels this pressure to make their poetry centre those traumas and centre pain first. Do you feel it’s expected of you or that you’re oftentimes forced to re-live those types of traumas?
CC: I tend to start from very small places. You know, a line, an image, an observation. And they often have nothing to do with anything super emotional (laughs). It might be something funny, overheard in a conversation, or just the way that a room looks. And I just want to start from there. And then slowly I’ll discover the poem’s true subject, and that often lead me to somewhere more serious and emotionally engaged and personal as well as political, quite often.
When I look back at the poems I was writing eight or nine years ago, I see that their starting points were in the traumatic, painful events of my childhood. They were about heartbreak and the various other anguishes that come with living, and they held pain at the centre of them. I still write about these things now, but differently—refracted through a few more years of living, perhaps. For a while I thought that I just needed to write through what I called my “trauma poems” to get to my “real poems”. You know, the ones where I ask questions about the nature of time and history and loneliness and life and loss. In some ways that’s been true; in other ways it isn’t—turns out it’s all related, who knew!
In the past few years, more often than not, the seeds of my poems tend to find their feet in the smallest places, moments, observations. As it is for 陳琛 Chen Chen, and I imagine for many other poets, our poems lead us from these very small places through the big questions we carry with us day-to-day, year-to-year, life-to-life, to deeper, often surprising places. I still write poems about my mother. I write poems about heartbreak (those are the most difficult to write and my least favourite to re-read and revise). I’m not one of those writers who says they hate writing, but I really do hate writing about romantic brokenheartedness. I still write poems about losing language and about missing home, which at this point has taken on a mythological quality.
Some of my writing still revolves around similar subjects because my past remains unchanged. What has changed, over time, is my relationship to the past, to the people in my life, and to the world presently around me. It’s hard for me to articulate in regular language, or any language at all, the why, how, what and who leading me through threshold after threshold into deeper, spirit-centred kinship with the world. It feels like asking myself to explain a spider’s web by describing individual threads and junctions.
The chapbooks and poetry collections I eventually send out into the world (I am, at my core, a hopeful person) will be the explanation. You can bet my acknowledgements will be long and winding. I can say, at the very least, that opening up to curious relationship with my ancestors, and reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Ways of Being Alive by Baptiste Morizot over the past year, have been seminal to filling in the blanks and wounds manufactured by a colonial education and capitalist environment.
So this spirit-centred kinship with the world is what I wanted to get to in today’s essay. This opening up to worlds living and spirit, to the wider cosmos, has led to an opening up to poetry. The syntax of that sentence forces some kind of linearity or chronology, but in reality, opening up to poetry and opening up to the world is something that is happening continuously and simultaneously. One leads and feeds into the other like the cycles of water on our planet. Reading a poem by Kathryn Nuernberger excavated new dimensions into my being in that very park, in a country that has originated so much destruction on personal and planetary levels. The wind blowing unpleasantly on my bare legs and a cute dog leaving its saliva on my page became part of a poem about wishing for permanence in love.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the joy and pleasure and complexity and depth and breadth this opening up brings to my life. And when I experience anything good, my immediate impulse is to want to share it with others. In the Before Times (as in, before this pandemic we’re in), I worked as a teacher and workshop facilitator for many years. In the present reality of our heating up/breaking down world/society, I’ve begun to locate myself with more clarity.
For some, building a better world means reforesting on land and on the reef. However, I (regrettably) did not choose marine biology and (not-regrettably) chose poetry as the focus of my studies in university. I don’t agree with that kind of compartmentalisation and separation, and the reality is: I am here at my computer writing fervently about poetry. The reality is I am not out in dive gear nurturing kelp forests. One day I would like to do both! For now, I think perhaps my contribution lies in helping people find ways to open up to the world and open up to poetry.
