Years and years ago, living and working
in California at a very elite Art and Music school, I had an
opportunity to meet Cecilia Woloch. She is a professional and gifted
poet, a self-identified Gypsy, and an amazing person with a huge
heart. She always treated me with respect and warmth. We actually had
a chance to go out to dinner once and it was a special memory I have
of those days.
I still get the email newsletters she
puts out from time to time, and I wanted to post a part of it. It is
an interesting view of our current world through her eyes, which is
much different than how I see it:
“Why
Write Love Poetry in a Burning World?
To
train myself to find, in the midst of hell
what isn't hell.
The
body, bald, cancerous, but still
beautiful enough to
imagine
living the body
washing the body
replacing a loose front
porch
step the body chewing
what
it takes to keep a body
going—
This scene has a tune
a
language I can read a door
I cannot close I stand
within its
wedge
a shield.
Why write love poetry in a burning
world?
To train myself, in the midst of a burning world
to
offer poems of love to a burning world.
Katie
Farris
There
isn’t any way to look away. Neither from the images of Gaza nor
from the images of Ukraine. Neither from the chaos in Haiti nor from
the chaos at the southern border of the U.S. Neither from the murder
of Aleksei Navalny in a Russian prison camp nor from the beautiful,
bloodshot eyes of his widow. Nor from the homeless encampment in the
median at the end of my block. From the suffering everywhere.
We
can’t look away, nor should we. But we can also look, as Katie
Farris reminds us, “to find, in the midst of hell,/ what isn’t
hell.”
What
isn’t hell is all around us, too. We can train ourselves to find
it, with the kind of attention a poet pays to the world, without
whitewashing or sentimentalizing. We can even make it mean. The
antidote to despair is meaning. Meaning is something we’re capable
of
making,
each of us, in our way, in our lives. As is beauty. I return often to
a line from Jorie Graham’s Overlord:
“Try to make of the grief a kind of beauty that might
endure.”
Aleksei Navalny urged all of us to do something,
even something small, as an act of resistance to tyranny – and to
despair, I would add. Your despair helps no one; but your compassion
might, and your courage — and courage comes from the heart,
literally, from the Latin cor,
meaning heart.
So take heart.
Reclaim
your right to joy, in the midst of a burning world, your strength in
the face of pain and grief, and the power of your imagination.
Reclaim your attention from the small screen in your hand and look up
at the sky. Take a walk in your neighborhood with your eyes and your
ears open, listen to the birds, befriend a neighbor. Turn your
attention to what’s immediately around you — the other human
beings, the natural world, the cityscape, local politics. Vote with
the collective good in mind. Refuse to think of yourself as
powerless. Commit an act of kindness. Do what you can, on a personal
level, to repair the tears in the social fabric.
Create,
in the face of destruction. Write a poem, dance, make art, make a new
friend in real life. Go to a live performance — a play, a concert,
a reading, an exhibition. Look for what’s flourishing, and for ways
to flourish.
“Why
write love poetry in a burning world? Katie Farris asks. To train
ourselves, “in the midst of a burning world/ to offer poems of love
to a burning world.”
There
are bright spots, too, when you look for them. Last week, walking
through downtown Los Angeles, I saw the unfinished skyscrapers,
abandoned by their developers, that are now covered with bright
graffiti – the work of artists and taggers from all over the city
and the country. It looked beautiful to me, and powerful, and it
lifted my spirits sky-high. Everyone I’ve spoken to thinks the
graffiti should remain, at least until the buildings can be put to
good use – maybe as affordable housing for Angelenos.”
Her
website is located here.
Take care out there!
