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Kelly Cherry
What the poet wishes to say
What the poet wishes to say cannot be said, in part because it has been said, and often, before, but this was true when only the second poet wrote. It becomes no truer with time. The bigger reason the poet cannot say what she wishes to say is that she wishes to say something that seems to be a kind of music, a word-field of music, as it's less a text and more a space of time profoundly charged by feeling, like the awe attendant to our modest place among the huge events of universal import: stars and novae, the initiating burst of Many from the One-the one what? Impacted point, or god, or some computer-generated simulacrum? In any case, the whole of it. If everyone could speak the whole, then everyone would speak poetry, but Moliere's gentilhomme was perfectly pleased to learn he had been speaking prose. Even for those whose language is poetry, the task requires a life of: practice, contemplation, prayer. (The latter two are sham without the first.) This life begins in echo and extends into apprenticeship, a period that may be short or long but always ends, if it ends, with the achievement of a vision or "showing," as Julian of Norwich called her visions of Jesus Christ, but we prefer "a view." (Transported as we are by art and music, the leap to faith remains a leap to faith.) So say "a view," a world view if you must, but know that you are only halfway home. Even with the view. Even speaking poetry. Because poetry is not the only language you must master. You must also learn the personal language that will convey your view, and since your view, so similar to the ones you love, also differs from them, if only because the time in which you live and write is different, you must invent that language, hoping a few readers follow on the same path and perhaps they will and perhaps they won't. But how to make a language of your own? In short, the process has to do with rhythm. The racing rhymes of Dante's terza rima so magnifies the interlocking of hell, earth, and heaven that the universe, the medieval universe, becomes one verse. And Chaucer's Wife of Bath is like a laugh so full and deep it shakes the ground of England. And Will, whose way with words created English, creates as well the tense, or rueful, clash between the life of action and the life within the skull, that secret, teeming world. Or consider a poet less removed in time, whose reputation for that reason is hard to know, yet Osip Mandelstam, arrested and in exile, begging food and blankets, honed the razor of his lines. Discussing Osip, poet Joseph Brodsky notes, "Whatever a work of art consists of, it runs to the finale which makes for its form and denies resurrection." This is true and not true, as it is, too, when he writes, "After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism." Both statements are rather more clever than correct. What follows a poem is often a poem in response. It's possible to write a poem that enacts its own resurrection. As for the poet, the poet aims not at immortality of self or reputation but of what he or she wishes to say, the world as it was, or seemed to be, on that day in mid-October when the hills were still green, the wildflowers scattered like birdseed from a hand not seen nor felt, and the various, changing, falling leaves swirled up again, caught in a sudden updraft, then settled on the ground like immigrants, a huddling, a community of color. A day when a small boy rushed to open the door to shout "Bonjour, Madame!" to a woman whom he'd never met and waked in her a feeling of sheerest joy, salvific and abiding. The poet wishes to say what life was like here on the planet in the twenty-first disturbing century and might, to do so, think of her beloved Beethoven, who, deaf and lonely, brought his art to such sublimity, it is as if he wrote his music among the spheres of music, working at a desk of sky, the innumerable stars for lighting, a gust of solar wind sending manuscript flying. In the late piano sonatas, you hear the composer placing his notes, solid and silken as they somehow manage to be, without hesitation but with deliberateness exactly where they are supposed to go, thereby fixing the apparatus of heaven God had let fall idle. | 
