Enclosure Letter to The Academy of American Poets, 2020
Dear Poet,
Have you practiced so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Two hundred years since Whitman’s birth, I still admit “yes” to his questions. And still I need the imperative and the promise that follows them:
Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems. You shall possess the good of the earth and sun.
A few weeks ago, my four-year-old daughter told me at breakfast, “The world is getting warmer.” They had discussed it at her preschool. She looked anxious and powerless. “It will make the world badder,” she said, “for the animals that live at the North Pole.”
I was bottlenecked by empathy and information. My partner saw her crying and sat down. He told her about a very large rock he’d seen in the woods behind our house. “It was covered in moss,” he said, “and had two beech trees growing beside it.” He asked if she would help him look for it again.
When my daughter found the rock she pressed her expressionless face to it, lay down on it. She wore her coat and mittens, but her cheek could feel the moss.
“Do you hear what it’s telling you?” my partner asked her.
“No” she said.
“It’s saying, ‘Thank you for taking such good care of me.’” She listened. She didn’t hear anything. “Listen,” he said, “specifically for that.” And she listened again. She listened until her face began to thaw.
“I hear it!”
For the rest of the day, my daughter looked and listened hard. An intricate leaf, her nesting dolls by the chair just when she’d hoped for them. “The rock put this here,” she said about the frost pattern on the window. She was connected, communicating, able to move.
Poetry can do this. Without turning away from the world’s responsibilities, poetry turns us toward the world, toward our abilities to respond. Poetry can locate a specific person in a body in a place, connected, necessarily, to all bodies in all places. It can communicate between isolated cells, reconnect the body, enable it to feel.
Poets are full of suggestions, as my partner was to my daughter. But the actual communication, the relationship itself, is between the reader and the poem—the girl and the rock. And it is a relationship of vulnerability, trust, and listening.
There are millions of suns left, suggests Whitman. Two hundred years later, all those suns are still present, and I am grateful to Whitman for pointing to them. I am grateful to Li-Young Lee for pointing to them, and for this opportunity to open toward them. I am grateful to the Academy of American Poets, Civitella Ranieri, Graywolf Press. And I am so grateful, writers and readers, to stop this day and night with you.
Thank you,
