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.

See more about the book at www.wildwoodriver.com