Where does poetry come from? Uninvited—it is a tender-footed intruder disrupting the currents of ordinary life. A fire that burns without injuring. A relentless riddle.
“A word after a word after a word is power”. A word after a word after a word burns as it liberates—illumines the dark rooms where the silent live, or should I say, the silenced. And why silenced?
“A word after a word/ after a word is power”*
Our most immediate and intimate form of writing is poetry. It becomes a protection charm, a secret weapon or source of power. A poem is so easily received, like a song, to be called upon in love and grief—in fear or the heat of revolution, remembered when witnessing what is deranged and senseless.
“For what is this rough beast/ it's hour come at last/ slouching towards Bethlehem to be born”**
Marie Howe refers to poetry as inextricably linked to the sacred, and how else could it be, arriving as it does uninvited, as insistent and restless for life as any living creature reaching for that first breath. We labor quietly, the Muses acting as perpetual midwives safely delivering line after line, poem after poem, the world never separate from this sacred stream. In a world stripped of magic it is poetry where the power of incantation and enchantment still exist.
“My daughter plays on the floor/ with plastic letters,/ red, blue & hard yellow,/ learning to spell,/ spelling,/ how to make spells.”*
Spelling, from True Stories, Margaret Atwood
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, poem by WB Yeats, arranged and adapted by Joni Mitchell