The World According to Poetry

a loving lens for life

Exactly a year ago, I watched the sun set over Playa Pelada in Nosara, Costa Rica. The sky darkened as a single, punctual star surfaced before her celestial comrades. I had never paid much attention to the evening star, but in that moment, I knew myself to be in the presence of a flawless poem. I felt awake to the artistry of the world: how its nightly parade of stars begins with one cheeky maestro. How sublime, that the stars announce themselves so! More to commemorate the memory than anything else, I created a poetry account on Instagram and wrote a tiny poem to catalogue that moment.

I don’t consider myself a skilled poet, but I love what writing poetry over the past year has done for my perception of the world. My poems tend to succumb to the confines of the Instagram medium: they are short n’ sweet. Perhaps because of this short-form practice, I’ve started to detect short little poems everywhere. In the wild, poems announce themselves with a sly wink. For instance, in a moment of terror as I contemplated death, a pert little poem raised its head to greet me. In another instance, I was strolling through farmlands in Portugal when I nearly walked into a caterpillar hovering just above my eyeline. That moment declared itself a poem in no uncertain terms, and I hurried home to transcribe it. In September, I was marching beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway during a rainstorm when a poem seized me by the collar and said, look here!

Often, loved ones hand me poems— inadvertently— from the sheer beauty of their beings. My dear friend Julie shared an instance in which she cried out of both compassion and loneliness. The duality that her being was able to hold— a sense of isolation, and a sense of connection borne out of that very isolation— registered as an undeniable poem. My partner Mark used to leave a candle on our kitchen counter to welcome me home after my late nights at Sleep No More, and that too, felt like poetry: the warmth of the tiny flame a beacon that encapsulated so much of his tenderness.

I’ve heard it said that in musicals, characters “randomly” burst into song because the emotions they’re feeling are too heightened to express through traditional speech. Poetry seems to possess a similar quality; my poetry radar starts beeping whenever life offers an apparent abundance of beauty or feeling. George Saunders, a literary fairy-godfather of the highest order, describes this phenomenon with his characteristic eloquence:

Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes… poetry, i.e. truth forced out through a restricted opening. That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence.

As a result of writing little poems, I spot little poems in the glorious excesses of the world. Mary Oliver, another literary patron saint, speculates: “Maybe just looking and listening is the real work. Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem.” Oliver harnesses poetry as a means of engaging with the world: “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Every artistic medium responds to life in its own distinct language, yet I’ve found poetry to be the most potent medium for observing life; for enabling its beauty to leap out at me.

Currently, I see poetry in these sublime pockets of life. The next (and more demanding) challenge will be to see poetry throughout all existence; to harvest divinity even in the unlikeliest places. Art is how we make sense of the world— and I want to view the world through the most penetrating, generous, and artful lens available to me. The trenchant poet Tony Hoagland penned it best: “Vale of tears, oh unreal city; dark world. Meet poetry.”

This particular post is pint-sized to honor the shortened poetic form described above! If you enjoy my writing, go wild and click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack.