To the Words

Dear Friend,

I am sitting in W.S. Merwin’s meditation dojo among the palms, in a garden made by enacting concern for the world. I’m here for the silence, to settle my own concerns about language into language, and to think about where and how poetry meets precarity. In these last days of a month dedicated to poems, I have with me one of William’s —”To the Words“—and an unpublished essay he wrote about the days in late September 2001 when through his “speechless helplessness” this poem “began to present itself.” 

Here in the quiet under the canopy, in the company of poem and prose, I come to see that I turn to poetry in times of my own wordlessness perhaps less for poetry’s capacity to render ideas, images, emotions in essential language, and more for its intrinsic qualities of resistance. By its very nature, poetry defies its own limitations. It touches what lies beyond language, then returns to convey what it found, mystery intact, by way of words. William writes:

“The imagination keeps reaching out for what cannot be said. That reaching out, I believe, is how language came into existence in the first place. To say what could not be expressed in any other way. The language of the imagination, in which that further dimension of poetry continues to abide, is the most ancient and the deepest use of words.” 

In the last days of a month in which the life of language has been both celebrated and threatened, I walk out of a garden (itself made of resistance) and into the din, assured that poetry resists precarity, and there is nothing precarious about poetry.
 
Wishing you well,

Sonnet