September 16, 2022
What Use is Poetry?
In Meena Alexander's poem “Question Time,” she writes, “What use is poetry?” and “We have poetry so we do not die of history.” Poetry can provide a documentary, an artistic investigation at the same time that poetry can become an ode sung to the beauty and resilience of the landscape and its people. The landscape of northern Minnesota is unique because the Northern Continental Divide crosses the Laurentian Divide, creating three watersheds. Water flows north to Hudson Bay, south to the Mississippi, and east to the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River/Seaway. In this water-rich place, mining of iron ore and taconite has removed billions of tons of earth. This region is now at risk of copper sulfide mining.
The poems in my book explore displacements of many kinds: of land, people, language, and wildlife. Poems document events such as floods and erosions, flights of birds and snail trails, mine pits and lakes, laborers and excavations for the removal of minerals. Poems go in, under and through waterways, in boats, into memory and history.
The title poem of Surface Displacements is a long poem that gathers images of displacement, waterways, and brief narratives of immigrants crossing by water and land. One can’t help being aware of people who are displaced: immigrants fleeing war, violence, climate conditions, or otherwise untenable situations. Or not just immigrants, homeless people who wander the streets of every community. There are many reasons that they are there: poverty, trauma, mental disorders, and/or addictions, Battered women often must flee their homes in order to find safety. Teenagers sometimes find themselves on the streets as runaways from family violence or dysfunction. The migration of people is as steady as the migration of birds.
Poetry is a language inside the language. In a poem in next to no time, years can collapse. Whole eras can elide into a few lines, or one moment can be forever held still. Poetry has underwater currents or forces. Muriel Rukeyser says “poetry can extend the document” in a footnote to her poems in “The Book of the Dead,” a section of her 1938 book titled U.S. 1. It is about the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, which killed at least 476 coal miners, mostly African American migrant workers, between 1930 and 1935. Her poems incorporate archival material about the mining disaster with lyric intensity. The title alludes to the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Mayan Book of the Dead, evoking the power and weight of those ancient funerary texts. In this way, the form of a poem along with its sound patterns, images, associations, and metaphors can bring together the said and unsaid. On a page, a poem has empty spaces that can be understood like the negative space in a drawing. Stanza breaks might be viewed as bends or turns in a river. Line endings in a poem form a shoreline to launch from and land upon, an empty and wave-washed beach, an edge where we can hold the losses and make new paths, where we search and find things new.
QUILT: Read Between the Lines
In some ways, writing a book of poems is similar to making quilts. Often I write poems in response to visual art or music. These are called ekphrastic poems. Lately, I've been honored to learn others are using my poems to create music and visual art. The composer Wendy Durrwachter recently received a grant to create a piece of music based on the title poem of my book, Surface Displacements.
The quilt artist Leslie Hughes created this piece of art after reading my book, Surface Displacements. Hughes' quilt is hand stitched and titled "Read Between the Lines." To thank her, I sent her a poem Quilt, published in The Mother Tongue.
QUILT by Sheila Packa
old garments cut into pieces
stitched into the fabric
so many women
cutting scraps into corners
into houses into entire lives
held with thread
pulled by the sharp needle
one eye
closing on the world
the way it was
the way it is
with an underside
a pattern not completed
fraying yet being mended
by hands
stitched into the fabric
so many women
cutting scraps into corners
into houses into entire lives
held with thread
pulled by the sharp needle
one eye
closing on the world
the way it was
the way it is
with an underside
a pattern not completed
fraying yet being mended
by hands
always being useful
washing, pressing out
the wrinkles
finding what shapes
will fit together
gathering into circles
to fasten the layers
over the hard frame
talking secrets
over the design
the thimbles click
the knots are tied
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