Creating Order

When was the last time I told you how grateful I am for your eyes on this page? Has it been too long? I’m sorry. I’m grateful for all the ways I get to communicate authentically with authentic people. It is literally the single greatest privilege of my life. I’d be so confused without it.

On the recommendation of multiple smart people, I’m reading Poetry as Survival by Gregory Orr and it’s helping me breathe.* It’s what I needed and everything else I was reading is to the side now (I just finished Bad Stories, I’ll tell you a little about it next week). In the introduction Orr writes:

We are creatures whose volatile inner lives are both mysterious to us and beyond our control. How to respond to the strangeness and unpredictability of our own emotional being? One important answer to this question is the personal lyric, the “I” poem dramatizing inner and outer experience.

Human culture “invented” or evolved the personal lyric as a means of helping individuals survive the existential crises represented by extremities of subjectivity and also by such outer circumstances as poverty, suffering, pain. illness. violence. or loss of a loved one. This survival begins when we “translate” our crises into language—where we give it symbolic expression as an unfolding drama of self and the forces that assail it. This same poem also arrays the ordering powers our shaping imagination has brought to bear on these disorderings. Thus the poem we compose (or respond to as readers) still accurately mirrors the life crisis it dramatizes, still displays life’s interplay of disorder and disorder. But in the act of making a poem at least two crucial things have taken place that are different from ordinary life. First, we have shifted the crisis to a bearable distance from us: removed it to the symbolic but vivid world of language. Second, we have actively made and shaped this model of our situation rather than passively endured it as lived experience.

I love how both reading and writing are mentioned here. I think it’s sometimes harder to read a poem than write it. I mean cognitively harder. So I like to see a poem and its prompt and found this pair of beauties to share with you. Let’s read the original poem first, and then an amazing piece written in its image by Carolyne Wright. Here we go:

“Vocation,” William Stafford

And here’s the Carolyne Wright poem:

This dream the world is having about itself…

—William Stafford

by Carolyne Wright

won’t let us go. The western sky gathers
its thunderclouds. It has no urgent need

of us. That summer in our late teens we
walked all evening through town—let’s say Cheyenne—

we were sisters at the prairie’s edge: I
who dreamed between sage-green pages, and you

a girl who feared you’d die in your twenties.
Both of us barefoot, wearing light summer

dresses from the Thirties, our mother’s good
old days, when she still believed she could live

anywhere, before her generation
won the War and moved on through the Forties.

As we walked, a riderless tricycle
rolled out slowly from a carport, fathers

watered lawns along the subdivisions’
treeless streets. We walked past the last houses

and out of the Fifties, the Oregon
Trail opened beneath our feet like the dream

of a furrow turned over by plough blades
and watered by Sacajawea’s tears.

What did the fathers think by then, dropping
their hoses without protest as we girls

disappeared into the Sixties? We walked
all night, skirting the hurricane-force winds

in our frontier dresses so that the weather
forecasts for the Seventies could come true,

the Arapahoe’s final treaties for
the inland ranges could fulfill themselves

ahead of the building sprees. We walked on
but where was our mother by then? Your lungs

were filling with summer storms, and my eyes
blurred before unrefracted glacial lakes.

Limousines started out from country inns
at the center of town, they meant to drive

our grandparents deep into their eighties.
Our mother in her remodeled kitchen

whispered our names into her cordless phone
but before the Nineties were over, both

of you were gone. Mother’s breath was shadow
but her heart beat strong all the way in to

the cloud wall. You carried your final thoughts
almost to the millennium’s edge, where

the westward-leaning sky might have told us
our vocation: in open fields, we would

watch the trail deepen in brilliant shadow
and dream all the decades ahead of us.