30 Poems 30 Days

I.

Unbeknownst to him

everything went dark.

A silence so loud

it could lighten all forgetting.

There,

at sea,

not adrift but integral to the water's hanging

there,

heaviness framed the day.

Day, dark silent loud bright,

again but also for the first time,

collapsed.

No longer time but in its place duration,

Space, sure, but expansive to distraction,

and on like this until

Unbeknownst to him

everything went dark.

II.

For the past 30 days I have dedicated myself to the volumes of poetry in my library. The primary purpose of this project was therapy, but therapy in a specific sense. Foucault provides insight into this philosophical practice of θεραπεύειν (therapeuein):

Therapeuein means in Greek three things. Therapeuein means, of course, to perform a medical action whose purpose is to cure or to treat. However, therapeuein is also the activity of the servant who obeys and serves his master. Finally, therapeuein is to worship (rendre un culte). Now, therapeuein heauton means at the same time to give medical care to oneself, to be one's own servant, and to devote oneself to oneself. (Hermeneutics of the Subject 98)

θεραπεύειν joins with a series of Ancient Greek terms—μελέτη (melete, “exercise”), γυμνάζειν (gumnazein, “to practice, to train oneself”)—to describe the wider practice known as επιμέλεια εαυτού (epimeleia heautou), which means “to care for oneself.” In Ancient Greece, this practice of caring for the self was expressly philosophical in the sense that it led to τέχνη του βίου (tekhne tou biou), the art of life, of existence. The end of philosophy was this art of life, which, dialectically, required a living into death.

To practice caring for myself and to cultivate a philosophical life, I turned to poetry. I’ll say more about the explicit connection between poetry and philosophy down below. Equally as important as the poetry itself, however, was the act of sitting down each morning or afternoon with a book of poems, making space for thought, and setting aside time to think through the relationship between language and life. “30 Poems 30 Days” provided a repeatable structure or performance score within which I could nurture self-reflexivity and re-tune myself to the world. Though the practice of caring for the self may at first sound self-centered (to the point of pejorative egotism or, at worst, solipsism), it actually leads one out from one’s self into the world. If you’re interested in reading more about this, check out Foucault’s series of lectures entitled, Hermeneutics of the Subject. For me, there is no greater goal in life than to care for the self, so that one may care for others, so that one may practice the art of existence.

The effort of re-tuning oneself to the world sounds quite laborious, and it is, but the labor was made easier by the realization that I have for years surrounded myself with numerous aids. Books on the shelf, which, without care, fall into the background as furniture, contain the wisdom of artists and scholars who devoted their lives to thinking about the complexities of Being and Becoming. I know this, and yet I have allowed my books of poetry to sit silently, opened, untapped. This project marked my return to these books and helped me re-familiarize myself with poetry in general, but also with the specific insights of 30 poets.

Here’s the complete list:

Poem 1 Day 1: “Immortal Autumn,” by Archibald MacLeish

Poem 2 Day 2: “The Weed,” by Elizabeth Bishop

Poem 3 Day 3: “Poem,” by Lawrence Durrell

Poem 4 Day 4: “Fugue for Eye and Vanishing Point,” by Suji Kwok Kim

Poem 5 Day 5: “The Solitude of Cataracts,” by Wallace Stevens

Poem 6 Day 6: “Edge,” by Sylvia Plath

Poem 7 Day 7: “The Angel,” by William Blake

Poem 8 Day 8: “XVIII [Two butterflies went out at noon],” by Emily Dickinson

Poem 9 Day 9: “Do Not Die,” by W. S. Merwin

Poem 10 Day 10: “Meadowsweet,” by Kathleen Jamie

Poem 11 Day 11: “Orkney Interior,” by Ian Hamilton Finlay

Poem 12 Day 12: “The Veteran,” by Dorothy Parker

Poem 13 Day 13: “The Self-Unseeing,” by Thomas Hardy

Poem 14 Day 14: “XXXV - To Fortitude” (from Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems), by Charlotte Turner Smith

Poem 15 Day 15: “On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour,” by John Keats

Poem 16 Day 16: “Loba” (excerpt), by Diane di Prima

Poem 17 Day 17: “105th Chorus” (from Mexico City Blues), by Jack Kerouac

Poem 18 Day 18: “The Last Secret,” by Helen Adam

Poem 19 Day 19: “To Be Called a Bear,” by Robert Graves

Poem 20 Day 20: “Han Venido,” by Alfonsina Storni

Poem 21 Day 21: “Amorosa Anticipación,” by Jorge Luis Borges

Poem 22 Day 22: “I Like to Think of Harriet Tubman,” by Susan Griffin 

Poem 23 Day 23: “Mulatto,” by Langston Hughes

Poem 24 Day 24: “Kitchenette Building,” by Gwendolyn Brooks

Poem 25 Day 25: “Response to Your Question,” by Rumi

Poem 26 Day 26: “Sonata for the Invisible,” by Joy Harjo

Poem 27 Day 27: “The Second Elegy” (excerpt, from the Duino Elegies), by Rainer Maria Rilke

Poem 28 Day 28: “Dreamwood,” by Adrienne Rich

Poem 29 Day 29: “The Manifestation,” by Theodore Roethke

Poem 30 Day 30: Reading to the Trees (excerpt), by Mary Catherine Schumacher 

III.

I don’t claim to understand poetry. Not knowing how exactly poetry works has in fact been the motivation for returning time and again to this particular form of expression. My father always asked me to read poems aloud, usually MacLeish. I think he particularly liked the sound of words and the challenge of uneven meters. When I got stumped by slant rhymes, he would laugh. But always with eyes closed he would listen to me read and then say, “Again!” We did this a lot when I was between the ages of 10 and 18. Later, in college, I took a poetry class that all but crippled by relationship to writers like Eliot and Plath. We were told there was a meaning to “Prufrock,” and I couldn’t accept that. Something about the academic disciplinarization of poetry failed me. But later, in graduate school, I started to learn the difference between academic disciplinary understandings of practices like poetry and philosophy, on the one hand, and the life practice of these things, on the other hand. Within the academy, some people may tell you that Eliot’s poems mean some(one)thing. If you look hard and listen closely, however, you’ll also find people who demonstrate that those same poems make something happen, that they do many things. Within the academy, especially within the U.S., some people may tell you that philosophy is the culmination of propositions derived usually from male philosophers. But if you read between the lines and don’t let school get in the way of your education, then you’ll also find those who demonstrate how philosophy names the process of caring for the self.

I’m not joining poetry and philosophy arbitrarily. The birth of performance philosophy has helped me articulate the need to emphasize the verb “to do” at least as much, if not more than, the verb “to be.” Let’s not dwell on what something is at the expense of what it does. How does philosophy act? How might performance constitute a philosophy expressed from the viewpoint of the body? Asking these questions led me eventually to the work of Alain Badiou, a philosopher who understands poetry’s contribution to the performance of thought. In his Second Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou writes the following: “The poem is not the guardian of being, as Heidegger thought, but the exposure to language of the resources of appearing” (29). This phrase kept rattling around in my head as I sat down each day to converse with the poems on my shelf.

But what does that phrase mean? I think that Badiou is acknowledging the following. First, the act of appearing should be treated as a resource. What does it make possible? As a resource, the act of appearing makes possible the knowledge that being is made up of forms of relation. Second, once we acknowledge these forms of relation, language can begin to engage with the multiplicity of the world. Prior to the intelligibility of this multiplicity, things will seem to appear as unified wholes. A tree seems to appear as a tree, unified and immutable. Once acknowledged in its multiplicity, however, the tree truly appears as a hanging-together of many elements (green-ness, branches, an effect against the sky, an oxygenator, a home for bugs, a highway for other bugs, etc.). Third, poetry names the instance of exposure when language gains access to the resource that renders the tree in all of its hanging-there-as-multiple-ness.

And why is this important? For me, within the terms of this proposal made by Badiou, poetry inaugurates an exciting opportunity, a chance for someone to wallow in this exposure. What one sees within the act of exposure changes depending on the multiplicity of elements that constitutes the poet and the poet’s environment. For Mary Catherine Schumacher, poetry exposes the land art enacted by birch trees, as well as the canvas-quality of the forest floor. For Joy Harjo, poetry witnesses the appearance of the Bear Dance within a Reno Holiday Inn. In the case of each poem, I tried to discover what precisely appeared to the poet as well as what type of language became necessary for indexing the act of exposure.

Attempting to enter each poem in this way, I quickly became aware that the poet and the philosopher perform a similar type of work. Again, Badiou offers some clear prose on this matter: “The philosopher is a worker in another sense: detecting, presenting and associating the truths of his or her time, reviving those that have been forgotten and denouncing inert opinion, s/he is the welder of separate worlds” (25). And I would add that the poet likewise welds separate worlds in order to present truth in its singular multiplicity. Amazingly, poets manage to present truth through fragments of language and through questions. Statements are not the privileged method of assertion, at least not within the poems I encountered. Consider Langston Hughes: “I wonder where I'm gonna die, Being neither white nor black.” Or Gwendolyn Brooks:

But could a dream sent up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday's garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms,

Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin? 

Or, oh my goodness, Rumi: “Why ask about behavior when you are soul-essence, / and a way of seeing into presence! / Plus you're with us! / How could you worry?” Somehow, the questions provide more than answers ever could and remind us that poetry steps in where typical statements stop short. Or, to say the same thing a different way, the questions coax me into hazarding answers, which, necessarily and always in good humor, result in failure (failure, in the Samuel Beckett sense: try again, fail again, fail better).

One final thought: poems need not appear in the typical form. Over these 30 days I’ve turned to other works, prose works, nonfiction writing, and seen in those works poetry hiding between the lines. If the work of the poet and the work of the philosopher are similar, then let us treat the language of philosophy as something similarly equipped with the resource of appearing (as Badiou might say).

IV.

These are dark times.

Battles against ignorance.

Ignorance with a leg up.

Ignorance as in not knowing,

made worse by willfulness.

A willful ignorance

and a strange darkness,

not from absence of light

but rather a substitution of fluorescence for incandescence,

lights that never brighten the darkness

even when on.

How many mantras enlisted to

help in the fight? 

“There is no freedom in life without freedom of mind.”

“Cheerful, militant learning.”

“Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”

All whispered in the dark against

the hum of the non-lights.

In the great symphony of belligerent keeping on

that hum is but one note

and the rest of us

wherever we are

must should can and so ought

to dissonate

sing knowing there is no off key

swarm like bees

write poetry to serve as instructions

for those learning to see.

But do not mistake this for hope.

Think, rather, of the minor

—another mantra—

“There is nothing that is major or

revolutionary except the minor […]

Opt for things in their very poverty […]

Go always farther in the direction of deterritorialization,

to the point of sobriety.”

Not hope then, but practice,

or, fine, if you will, practice hope.

These are dark times.

But there, do you see?

All those people practicing?

We can hear it coming for it is already here.

The most dissonant singing

to awaken deaf ears.

And so one more for good measure,

a banner under which to march:

“Not to be unworthy

of what happens to us.”