A Place for the Genuine

I’ve been rereading Space Struck, Paige Lewis’s book of poems, and there’s this part that goes,

                                               I think
about how hard it is for me to believe

in the first Adam because if Adam
had the power to name everything,
everything would be named Adam.
—From Last Night I Dreamed I Made Myself

I’m desperate for names, but for me naming is fraught and complicated, because I do not trust myself not to name everything  John. I can only see the world from this particular consciousness. I am stuck for my entire session on this planet inside of one particular skin-encased bacterial colony, and I construct even those closest to me in the context of me and mine—my kids, my spouse, my congressperson. How am I ever to get out of this self that cannot see past its own mines?

Annie Dillard once wrote, “We live half our waking lives and all our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.” But I spend much more than half my waking life swimming in those insensible waters. I need to be awakened, to have the eyes of my eyes see, the ears of my ears hear, and that’s why I read poetry, to wrest me up out of the insensate so that I might find form for the deeply abstract stuff that I cannot understand until I have a name for it other than Adam.

Poetry gives me language. Nicole Sealey gives me a new and better name for love when she writes, “There’s a name for the animal//love makes of us—named, I think,/like rain, for the sound it makes.” Or how about the name for love Langston Hughes gave us when he wrote, “Because you are to me a prayer/I cannot say you everywhere.” I don’t have a name outside of myself for the way my map of the world shapes my experience of the world until I read Whitman: “There was a child went forth every day,/And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became.”

But I also need language to understand other people, and their experiences, especially when those experiences are different from mine. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion wrote, “It is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level.” If I do not learn the names of those values, I will never understand the ways in which I am their unconscious instrument. If poetry is a way into myself and my experiences, it is also a way out of that self, an opportunity to listen to others, and thereby to better understand the ways that I participate in, for instance, power systems that I would strenuously reject on a conscious level. I think of James Monroe Whitfield renaming America back in 1853: “America, it is to thee/Thou boasted land of liberty,—/It is to thee I raise my song,/Thou land of blood, and crime, and wrong.”

All I’m really trying to do is stay alive with my attention intact, and ultimately that’s why I need poetry. It reveals new truths to me, and re-reveals what I thought I knew. In “Poetry,” Marianne Moore famously wrote that reading poetry “with a perfect contempt for it, one/discovers that there is in/it after all, a place for the genuine.” I didn’t know, of course, how much I needed a place for the genuine until Moore named it for me. I don’t know anything isn’t named Adam until it gets named for me. I know that for some people thought is not so dependent upon language, and understanding not so contingent upon names. That’s OK. I’m just telling you that I need poetry, that it is not an indulgence or a luxury for me, but the best antidote to mere despair that I can find at the moment, that it helps me to feel un-alone even way down deep where the loneliness would otherwise be absolute. I realize that I’m preaching to the choir here, but I need you to keep singing, so.