Poetry is a conversation with yourself and your worlds
You speaking to you speaking back to you.
Dear friends,
Hallo to you this Sunday. You’re welcome if you’re new to this letter, or if you’ve been around for a few months. It’s lovely to write to the you that you are.
First of all, thank you for the very moving conversations in the comments thread last week in light of the invitation to share a story of love that has taken time to unfold in you: human stories gathered in a little Substack corner. I found great comfort in reading through.
I’ve had a love of time travel since I was able to watch Star Trek as a youngster. I thought it was a childish thing, but the more I think about it, the more necessary time travel seems to be. Much of what you were doing in the comments last week was a version of time travel: taking something in the past, and noticing it now, noticing what was actually happening then, noticing how it is that time has done some work in you, noticing what else was happening alongside the particular event you were recalling.
The beloved and brilliant Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote a book entirely addressed to himself (he is the speaker, as well as the spoken-to) called Absent Presence, and in it, he becomes his own father, in an act of benevolent time-travel. He writes:
You are, as it were, my child, and I your father. Your father did not spoil you, lest your brothers throw you into the pit in the tale. Carry me as I carried you, so that I may see in the distance that blue which seeps out of every distance and which distance purifies of any stain. There is a wider field in the tale than in reality.*
Here, Mahmoud Darwish speaks to himself tenderly. He calls himself his own child, and speaks with the voice of a father to himself. He recognises that the father he is to himself has been both absent and present, and all the while intimate: “Carry me as I carried you… .” He’s granting himself some perspective, that “wider field in the tale than in reality.” In my years of work on conflict resolution, I noticed that if someone had the capacity in the moment to give themselves this sense of wide space and wide time, all kinds of understanding, connection, resolution, and creativity could be possible. That time can take time to come, though, as I know we all know well.
So, taking some inspiration from Darwish’s brilliant capacity,
I’m curious what voice you’d choose to speak to yourself with as you consider your own self, and what’s one thing that voice would say.
It might be that you want to bring the voice of your younger self to speak to your self today; or the voice of a creative self to speak to a self that feels stuck, or the voice of an understanding self to speak to a you that’s feeling judged. These are poetry exercises in point of view, in time, in the form of speaker and addressee of a text … but they are also deeply human exercises, ways of having that most vital conversation: the one with your own good self.
Friends, I’ll be glad to see you in the comments this week. And until then, I hope you’re very well,
Pádraig
*Darwish. Absent Presence. Translated by Muhammad Shahin. London: Hesperus, 2010.
Poetry in the world
On Being LIVE
Seats are filling up to see Krista Tippett in conversation with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón in Minneapolis at the end of the month. This will be a live recording for the upcoming season of On Being – if you’re in the Twin Cities area, we’d love to see you there (and do come say hello to our local team!). You may know Ada Limón’s poem “Wonder Woman” from Season 2 of Poetry Unbound, or found it in the Poetry Unbound book. Get your tickets here to join in person on January 26 at 7pm CT, at Northrop on the University of Minnesota campus. You can also register to join online.
Feed the Beast book launch
Also on January 26, I’m hosting two online launches for a book of my own poems published earlier this month called Feed the Beast.
One is on Zoom at 6pm GMT (London/Dublin) in conversation with Dante Micheaux.
The other is also on Zoom at 7:30pm ET (4:30pm Pacific; 5:30pm Mountain; 6:30pm Central) where I’ll be in conversation with Ellen Bass.
You’re most welcome – it’d be a delight to spot a few names from this Substack community.
Sunday series through the Rowe Center
There’s still room to join me this winter for “Practicing the Inner Life,” a weekly series I’ll be leading through the Rowe Center. Sundays from 7-9pm ET, January 29 through February 26. It’s all online, with a program cost of $250. Registration and more information here.
Hey buddy, that little
Softness in your belly
No need to cover it up
It will fade with time
And then return
No matter.
Count it as a gift
A reminder that above and beneath
The muscle is the soft
You, the precious one
Open to grace, cherished
By the divine, worthy
At your core.
I am the mother I am, but not mothering my child, but myself. I would remind myself that perfection is false and humility is real. All of us are fragile, fallible and forgivable. And I am allowed to be coddled, to fail and I will always be loved and forgiven. I am not only the child of my hard parents, who were afraid of life, but I am also the child of the wild Divine, who calls out to us to live, to dance, to sing, and to love everyone, even myself.