My Old Friend, the Poet

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!