Finding and Found by Poems

Finding and Found by Poems

I mentioned earlier that I’m interested in poetry as such—in the making of poems and reading of poems--in the mysterious processes by which these peculiar combinations of sounds sometimes though not always represented by these strange configurations of shapes forming letters forming words forming phrases forming lines forming ideas come to have such power to move us, to change us, to help and to heal us. I’m interested, too, in the points of contact where those odd collocations of sound and sense find or get found by hearers or readers and this new thing emerges—the experience of the work’s realization as an act of communication, as a means of connection, as, in the best cases, a vehicle of communion. I’m interested in all of that and more—the enigma of how poems sometimes seem to discover us and speak to us words we most need to hear, just when we most need to hear them.

Describing the process from the poet’s perspective, Osip Mandelstam used the wonderful figure of bottled messages tossed out to sea with the prayer they’d reach whatever stranded, shipwrecked reader they were addressed to without the author’s conscious awareness or understanding of who or where or how or why.

I love this idea—that the making of the poem, the release of the work into the world amounts to an act of faith and an act of love. Love for this other—this diffuse community of others—the specific identity of which the poet will likely remain unaware this side of eternity.

God knows how often I have discovered (been discovered by) such bottles washed up on the rocky shore of my existence. Robert Frost’s “Direct” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” and “Wishing Well” by Gregory Pardlo and “Climbing” by Lucille Clifton and Hugh’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle” by Tom Andrews and Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “Jubilee” … I could go on like this all day, riffing off the top of my head, loving these poems back in gratitude for what they’ve given me. The bottle appears at the tidewrack; I uncork it and remove the message; and suddenly: contact! connection! suddenly I re-member I’m not alone.