(All Images by The Drifter)

“It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”

– William Carlos Williams

“Look at / what passes for the new. / You will not find it there but in /

despised poems.” – William Carlos Williams

The above lines appear so simple that any literate child could have written them in her or his off moments.

At the same time, it took me twenty years of periodically re-reading and returning to these lines before I was able to understand them in their deeper levels, or in what Ralph Ellison called “the higher frequencies.”

I always knew there was something there, but just what it was always seemed to elude me.

It was this mystery, this enigma, this most simple yet deepest of riddles, which kept me returning to these lines, as with so many other great lines of poetry.

When you know what it is but also know you don’t really know what it is (and Socrates said the most important thing to know is what you don’t know), the mind-heart-body-spirit must engage with the work in a way that is beyond mere mental exercise, but also is mental exercise of the highest kind.

By the word “high,” I mean that it makes you feel high.

The word “kind” in another guise is another thing poetry is, even when it’s savagely satirical.

The honest and plain truth is that poetry says what nothing else can say, whether that something else be politics, science, philosophy, or even religion, which is why poetry is a religion to many.

It is a religion to an uncountable, indefinable, and scattered multitude, now and always.

It is what made us human (“in the beginning was the Word”) and it will be the last thing to go when and if we ever become no longer human.

There is nothing to believe; but somehow poetry makes you believe it anyway.

Key Notation: A novel like MOBY DICK or JANE EYRE or a Nathaniel Hawthorne or Carson McCullers short story are also, very much so, “poetry.” Wallace Stevens said that we should go around collecting poetry from the epiphanic moments in our lives and put those moments into words only afterwards; and so on one level, there is no greater argument for the holiness of poetry in and of itself than this.

The Drifter