Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So an open poetic identity begins with a definition:
"Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance,"
said Carl Sandburg.
"Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance."
What do we do with that?
What could that possibly mean?
We can't do anything with it;
it doesn't mean anything, and that's precisely the point.
We can't buy it or sell it or even really figure it out.
It's simply beautiful and mysterious,
and it kind of puts us in this open space of possibility
and beauty.
Now, what if we replace the word "poetry" with the word "I,"
as in "I am an echo asking a shadow to dance"?
Then we, too, as being, as agent of energy and information
become this realm of curiosity and wonder,
become a space of possibility.
I mean, how do we articulate the miraculous?
It was T.S. Eliot that said,
"Poetry is a raid on the inarticulate."
(Laughter)
Now, each one of you out there, every one of you,
is a little, breathing, beautiful little miracle
whether you think of yourself as such or not.
That's the truth.
Apparently, we have six trillion biochemical interactions
happening within our bodies per second.
Now, that's miraculous.
So how do we give words to that level of self?
That's where an open poetic identity comes into play.
Now, the word "poet" literally means "to make, to create."
The poet is a creator.
But today I want to use the word "poet"
as stand-in for "enlightened human citizen."
As in, all of us:
poet mechanic, poet bus driver, poet software developer,
poet mom, etc.
Not that I want you all to become poets literally.
God help us.
You think we have an unemployment problem now.
(Laughter)
No. I want you to do what you do poetically.
That is to say mindfully, with a kind of grace and beauty woven in.
With a kind of grace and beauty woven in.
So today, we're taking on an open poetic identity,
which begs a primal human question:
Who am I?
Who am I really?
"I cannot tell what I am
because words can describe only what I am not,"
said Nisargadatta Maharaj, great Indian mystic.
"I cannot tell what I am
because words can describe only what I am not."
So how did I come to this open poetic identity myself?
Well, I grew up in suburban Connecticut
to distant and alcoholic parents
and a governess, a Swiss German governess named Miss Heddy.
Now, remember Grendel from the Beowulf myth, the monster?
That was Miss Heddy.
She was terrifying, nasty, mean, controlling
and eventually violent.
The words I remember most coming from Miss Heddy
were "You should be ashamed of yourself."
And for most of my life, I was.
I had to listen to that Brene Brown TEDx Talk about 500 times
to get over all that shame, vulnerability.
So between Grendel and Mom, I started drinking at age 12.
By 19, I'm a committed binge drinker,
and there's this horrific night when I'm at a party
and I've consumed way too much alcohol.
I end up blacking out, face down in the driveway.
Nobody notices I'm there, my friend Mike included.
He's ready to go at some point.
He jumps into his car, cranks the radio, backs up,
drives right over me.
Somehow he hears me screaming.
He drags my bleeding body into the car,
drives drunk to the hospital.
Next morning, Mom and Dad meet me there, and they're disappointed:
"Son, we're very disappointed in you."
More shame, more drinking.
It's a cycle that continues for a couple more years
until I wind up back in the hospital - this time in Colorado -
and arrested for assault and battery.
Another story.
So with the law on one side
and a girlfriend threatening to leave on the other, bless her heart,
I finally quit drinking.
I move to California to start anew.
I go out to California and meet a new friend.
He's in something called therapy,
and he's known me for all of a week,
and he says, "You could use therapy."
(Laughter)
So I join his therapy group.
But it turns out, his therapy group is really a psychedelic therapy cult.
(Laughter)
So I get swept up into this chaotic group,
complete with the lack of boundaries,
the tons of illegal drugs,
the sleeping with selective students -
it's a total mess.
But they used to have these weekend workshops.
One night, we had a weekend workshop, and it's all men; it's up on Mount Diablo.
And they we are, sitting around the fire circle.
It's midnight, and my teacher is there.
He's wearing a black hood and robes,
he's got henchman on either side of him,
(Laughter)
and he's having us write down on little sheets of colored paper
the most important things in our lives at that time
and then crumple them up and throw them into the fire, one by one.
And I'm getting very emotionally involved in this.
And there's this long, eerie silence,
and then he yells from across the fire circle -
he's looking right at me.
I've never heard the guy yell before,
and he yells: "You! Any last words?"
(Laughter)
At that point, my fear and the night sky have become the thief of language;
I am wordless.
And then he says, "Take him," and his henchmen get up.
They run over to me, put a bag over my head, drop me in a burlap sack.
They drag me through the forest, and they tie me to a tree,
(Laughter)
where I think it's a joke, kind of, at first,
but then I'm really mortified and horrified, and I'm freaking out,
and I'm weeping with this immense force.
I think I'm going to die here,
and I'm convinced I'm the only one they've done this to.
So I'm weeping and weeping in this state of utter despair and fear.
And then there's this sort of -
I mean, I see my whole life flash in front of me.
And then there's a nothingness and more nothingness,
and I realize I'm alive.
I'm actually alive; I'm not dead.
In some ways, I've never felt more alive.
And I vowed in that moment, I said to myself,
"If I ever get untied from this tree,
I'm going to give myself to creativity, to service and to love."
(Applause)
And I did. I did.
A couple months later, I found myself at a poetry reading,
which was very unlikely for me.
Poetry wasn't my thing, but there I was.
There was a poet there reading a piece by Jack Spicer,
one of my now favorite poets - I didn't know who he was at the time.
And in this poem, he says,
"The poet builds a castle on the moon made of dead skin and glass."
And I just thought that was the most beautiful, strange, wild thing
I'd ever heard in my life.
I didn't know what it meant, but I knew I wanted in.
I wanted to be that kind of artist.
You know, to elicit that sort of imaginative fervor, you know.
And that was the point that really sparked a life of art and poetry.
So flash forward a couple of years - a few years, actually -
and I'm teaching with California Poets in the Schools,
thousands of kids throughout Northern California.
Now kids, as we know and we've heard, are amazing.
They have this innate capacity for creativity.
When you really open your heart, listen carefully and kind of switch roles
and say, "Now I'm the student, you're the teacher.
I want to hear about what you feel and what you know
and what you think about the world,"
the poetry just spills forth.
And I realized in that moment
that this was the most important work to do in the world.
If people could realize who they really were,
if they had a safe place to express their true poetic self,
it could change the world;
it could change everything.
And a perfect example comes from one of our students, age nine.
She wrote a poem that she called "Secrets."
"Turquoise laughter,
an eagle in the sky,
a butterfly whispering in a dragonfly's ear,
the angels peering in from a corner window -
just like a poet weaving her story on a loom of sawdust."
Loom of sawdust - wow!
I just thought that was the most beautiful thing
I had ever heard.
So this is the essence, really, of an open poetic identity,
an open poetic identity.
So,
when we come to our lives with this open poetic identity,
anything becomes possible.
So,
there I was, listening to this student's poem
and just really feeling that level of openness.
I realized that if we could somehow generate that fervor within us,
that if we could give ourselves,
we could look deep inside ourselves
and come up with an open, full commitment
to a poetic identity,
then we, too,
we, too, could change the world.
So thank you so much.
(Applause)