The Transformative Powers of Good Poems

Finding new words where before there were none.

More than at any other time in my life, I feel like these days there’s a momentous feeling in the air. Every now and again, I feel like there’s a quality about our lives that’s solid but not, touchable yet ineffable. There’s a tip-of-the-tongue reality that deserves a voice that, before now, has not been available.

This quality of “something unknowable in the air” is a feeling that occasionally shows up in conversations I have with good friends. Depth psychologists call these faint “something unknowable in the air” sensations that are impossible to put into words “unthought knowns.”

This quality of “something unknowable in the air” showed up for me last week in a conversation I was having with Dennis. Dennis is a client of mine, and a good friend. These days, we meet occasionally; mostly to catch up. But there are occasions when one or the other of us calls, and we find a time to meet. Generally, these meetings are times when we sit and sit, and then eventually find a way to help each other talk about whatever’s been troubling us that we’ve had difficulty putting into words.

The conversation I had with Dennis last week started, as these our conversations usually do, with us catching up. Last week, we talked about our work, the books we’re reading, and the everyday things we’d been doing since we last met.

Finally, we were done talking. But there obviously was still more that needed some out-loud words. So we sat for a while. Dennis and I’ve been to this ‘done-but-not-finished’ place before. Enough times to know that last week, after an hour of sharing, neither of us had anything ordinary left to say. But nonetheless there was still more that needed saying.

Over the years, Dennis and I’ve discovered that these “done-but-not finished” moments are places where saying anything that’s NOT ordinary will open up a doorway that eventually will lead us to whatever else needs saying. So, after a few minutues of silence, Dennis asked me if he could read me a poem by Wendell Berry that he’d recently discovered. A bit surprised, I said sure.

Here’s the poem he read to me:

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.”

After he finished we sat silently for a while. Then I ask him “What’s this poem saying to you?”

He sat for a couple of minutes, then he reached into his backpack and pulled out a Washington Post article dated June 24, 2020, titled “‘We are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them’: Three cops fired after racist talk of killing black residents’” and put it in my lap.

“I don’t know why,” he said, “but this Washington Post news story, together with Berry’s poem are bringing up this feeling for me that the story this article is actually pointing to is one horribly dark reality about America that I never let myself know about. When I try to think about this self-imposed ignorance of mine, this tone deafness to what I think are terrible wrongs, I come up empty. I don’t know what to say or do about a reality like this. Do you think Dave, that Berry could be right? Are we all so wounded by America’s “original sin” that we’re actually just coming to the beginning of our reckoning?”

The two of us talked for while about whether Dennis’s fear that all the murdered black men and women that we’re yet again beginning to face up to, and all the racial hatred that’s seemingly infected at least a few white policemen are signs telling us that we’ve only just begun to comprehend the price this country’s original sin is going to cost us. Despite the 240+ years of struggle we’ve already gone through.

We, of course, didn’t come up with any answers for these issues.

None at all. But we had said what we’d never before said to anybody. We left this door wide open, and said goodbye.

Two days ago, I emailed Dennis a few words on how I was doing with the issues he’d open up. To give him a sense of where I was on the hopefulness side of these issues, I sent him a copy of Antonio Machado poem I Never Wanted Fame. It, I told him, at least sums up where I want my sense of things to be…

“Mankind owns four things
That are no good at sea:
Rudder, anchor, oars,
And the fear of going down.”

In this same email, I also sent Dennis a paragraph from Jane Hirshfield’s book Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World.

“…poetry’s ends are, in truth, peculiar…true poems, like true love, undo us…they elude our customary allegiance to surface reality…A good poem…is thirsty. It pulls toward what is invisible to an overly directed looking…toward what is…volatile, unprotected and several-handed. Poems rummage the drawers of what does not yet exist but might in the world, in us.

Bringing it all together…

The two poems and Jane Hirshfield’s comments that I sent Dennis are not offered here as answers to any of the issues that either Dennis and I or America are struggling with just now. Nor did I, with the two poems I emailed Dennis, intend to give him any answers to the issues.

Rather, my emails to Dennis, and this entire article — with its substance, its poems, and its emotions, was and is only meant to suggest the idea that there are different feelings in the air around us these day, feelings that are necessarily ineffable and hard to find words for.

And that, what therefore may be true for many of us is the idea that when we find ourselves mute in the face of the need for new words, that poems — really good transformational poems — might be the “starter kit” we need to kick start new conversations about issues we’ve never before been able to have.

Thanks for reading this article. If you’re interested, you can find more transformational poems here, and more information about the 21st century’s newest challenges at Transformational Learning Opportunties.com.