Where are the Happy Poems, part II

I put together my first chapbook to fufill the requirements for the honours program at Creighton, where I took my undergrad degree. I was supposed to do a paper in my degree area, but I petitioned to do a chapbook instead, and the honors committee agreed, mostly, I think, because no-one on the honors committee wanted to read my paper on the use of Aerogel in Cherenkov detectors. It turned out to be a peculiar defense, because both my advisor and my research mentor were physicists. The only question that stumped me: why is poetry so depressing?

I didn't have a good answer. That first chapbook was dismal and angst ridden, though it did contain a couple of good poems, notably "Trinity." But then, all my poet friends where writing dismal, angsty poems, too, so I didn't think that peculiar. Now I do. Why do poets writes so many depressing poems? The more I think about it, the more it seems a good question.

I have two thoughts. The first is that poetry moves, as I said in "Night Patrol": "darn close to silence." I was sitting across from Robert Kroetsch when I wrote that poem, both of us looking out at the deer grazing in the creek bottom at Sage Hill. He asked me to read it out. I took a big deep
breath and did. (Not without my voice shaking a little.) "I like that," he said. (I started to breathe again.) "Writing poetry is like that," he said, after a minute. "You spend an awful lot of time darn close to silence." And the things that we keep silent about--or the places in which we are silenced--are not, generally, happy. I love and value poetry for giving voice to things which otherwise aren't speakable. Poetry is where we turn when we don't know what to say. After September 11th, after all, you didn't find people all reading short stories together.

But another thought strikes me. Poetry is an way of seeing exactly, of paying real attention. We don't do much of that. We're half-blind with habit and idea. It takes pain to shock us into opening our eyes. It takes pain to make us pay attention. And so, when we write, we write about the pain.

I think it's possible to learn to open our eyes in everyday life. Anyway, I'm trying. Reading other people's poems helps. My sister Wendy, who's doing the same thing in her painting, helps too. My writer's notebook helps more. When I'm there for my notebook, I see things better. I have more vivid dreams. And extraordinary conversations with strangers.

And my poems are -- sometimes -- happy.

Ardennes, January 1945

Snow sluffs from a pine bough --
you got to know the sound,
the kinds of crust: which would creak
and which would tick.
Got so you'd move
darn close to silence.