Hope is a Round Thing

and what goes around, comes around

Jon Fosse said in his Nobel speech that poetry isn’t about communication, but communion. It has me re-thinking a lot of my suppositions regarding the shoulds and the what-it-is-es of poetry.

When I first heard him say this, I reflexively put it in the context of his devout Catholicism. But even in that context, maybe the whole distinction between communication and communion is the required intimacy of the latter.

I couple this with Lucille Clifton’s (parial) definition of poetry as a way of living in the world, and a way to make peace with the world. In and with. That feels intimate to me.

It seems to me that the love-stuff is easy. Among the things of which I’m proudest, is the fact that two people have written poems for me. One was a lover, and one was a friend, but in terms of the depth of intimacy in the poems, they are equal. I’m proud because it felt like proof of having participated in a communion, of having helped do something worthwhile in the world because those kinds of feelings spill outside of the relationships. They are catching: the lover and the beloved glow. Even when the lover is a poet and the beloved a beetle. The world – if just for a moment – will see the beetle differently. It will glow.

A firefly.

But what about the world’s anger? The intimacy of violence, and of pain? Is inviting a communion of the blood and the torn flesh – of damaged spirits, a way to live in the world?

Is the act of pulling someone into someone else’s grief a kind of poetry? The poet Malkia Devich-Cyril has said that the opposite of joy isn’t grief, but indifference. I am wondering if that means grief has an inherent element of hope? If anger is always a request for relief?

Clifton has also said that poetry isn’t about answers, but questions. And I believe that every question is an expression of hope.

And hope, then? What is that? Noun. Verb.

Mariame Kaba isn’t a poet. She is an activist who talks about hope. She has said that hope is not an emotion, nor it is the same as optimism. She describes it as a discipline. Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, writers and activists, have coined the term “Active Hope”. They liken it to Tai Chi or gardening, “something you do rather than have.”

Every morning now – in my simplified life – I focus on the energy as I flow through the 18 moves of shibashi. I hope that the discipline will ground me. Open me. That this will allow poetry to flow into me. And through me.

A flower is a poem of beauty. And a scorched earth is a poem of hope.

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“muscle memory”
resisting the mystic why
of the slow motion
rebounding between the palms:
always round, this energy