Reaching for Words
Dear Friends,
Bewilderment keeps my words at bay in these early weeks of the new year, and the high winds churning above Maui keep my thoughts aloft and out of language. I look to poets—those who conjure words from emptiness, even while knowing that words themselves are made of emptiness, and hold it in the bends of their small bodies. I seek out an unpublished essay that W.S. Merwin wrote in the late days of September 2001, titled “Listening Afterwards.” William asks: “how is it that poems manage to give us comfort, when embedded always in their subject, part of their innate authority, is the reminder of the unsayable unknown around us?”
In these same weeks I have found comfort, if not language, in the voices of five brilliant women whose words cradle emptiness within their fullness. U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón writes of “A New National Anthem,” and a flag that waits in its perfect fold “until the song in your mouth / feels like sustenance.” Hawaiʻi State Poet Laureate Brandy Nālani McDougall asks “Aia i hea ka wai o Lahaina?” in a poem she wrote in the wake of the Maui fires with Dana Naone Hall and Noʻu Revilla, when alone she couldn’t find her way to words: “Whatever needed to come in terms of a poetic response,” Brandy says, “needed to be from a sense of community, of people coming together.” You can hear Ada and Brandy read these poems on February 27, when we broadcast our most recent Green Room. And in this video portrait, our most recent writer-in-residence Terry Tempest Williams recalls her first visit to the palm garden 20 years ago, while deep in grief at the loss of a loved one, and the words William offered then to invoke an animating emptiness:“This is where we write from.”
As you reach for your own words amidst the tumult of our world, I hope you find solace in the seeking, and in the voices you encounter along the way. As William wrote in that essay, “the recognition that the unknown and the unsayable are being even partly conjured into words comforts us in ways that we cannot ever quite explain, and that are deeper than reason.”
Sonnet
