Love Into the World

One time, a dear friend of mine went out with a guy who was kind of a jerk. He was having a rough patch, and she was trying to help him through it because she is a sweet person. At the end of what was to be their final date, she told him that she understood what it was like to be frustrated with life – that she was a poet, and it could be very hard to handle working and creating art that you knew might not ever get out into the world (or something along those lines). This rake of a gent replied that yes, poetry was pretty pretentious and useless, wasn’t it? She walked out on him, and bully for her, I say. (I’d like to add to that he is a musician…)

I think about that a lot – the potential uselessness of what I’m doing. I’ve not yet been published, and I don’t know if I ever will. It gets frustrating, particularly when I feel like I have things worth saying. It is also frustrating for me to justify not only to other people but also to myself why I do what I do – that is, spend hours alone indulging in writing that may never see the light and that may actually be pretty stupid, when I could be out doing other things, like I don’t know, working to save humanity (ha) or trying to meet a guy (ha. ha. ha!)

But then in church today, our fantastic preacher found a way to address both the Boston Marathon Bombing and Earth Day. He did this by sharing a few poems that addressed not only the beauty of the world, but the peace that we can find in the beauty of the world. One of them, The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry can be found here, while the other, Wild Geese by Mary Oliver, can be found here.

After I heard those poems, I couldn’t help but think about how poetry – and art, in general – is so much the opposite of pretentious and useless. Rather than be pretentious, if done right, poetry is the most accessible medium, bridging people from different experiences and cultures, uniting them by rhythm and image and language. Rather than being useless, poetry can make sense of the things that are difficult for us to understand. Take this poem about lynching, by my friend Ansel Elkins, who recently won an NEA grant, or the poem “The Starfish” by my friend Stefanie Silva.

Suddenly, it occurred to me that in working on my writing, I’ve lost track of the true, higher purpose of writing (and art), a purpose that was illuminated to me through another peace of art, my favorite childhood book, Harriet the Spy, in which Ole Golly asserts that writing “is to bring love into the world.” 

I think I lost that idea in the competitive pressure cooker that was the MFA program, as well as through the process of living and getting mad at people and really wanting to “get them in memoir” (ok, now that I say that out loud, it sounds like something a crazy person might say). And maybe that works for some people, but so far, it isn’t working for me. Maybe  if I can take any good out of this week, it can be the realization that love, after all, is the highest form of art.