Answering Ben Cameron - Part 1

One of Ben Cameron’s talks [available in four parts on YouTube] was instrumental to the creation of Architrave. I encourage anyone interested in making art happen to give him a listen, and not just because he’s the Executive Director of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Listen to him because he listens to all the artists and organizations that he encounters. He listens to the people who consume art, too, so he has lots of good advice to help us navigate our changing world. During this particular talk, Mr. Cameron asks four pithy, pesky questions about why what we do should matter to anyone else. It’s good exercise:

Question 1: What is the value of [your art form]?

Answer: Maybe you remember hearing Scott Simon read W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” over the airwaves just after 9/11. Even if you didn’t hear Simon’s reading, the poem was quoted so extensively during that time you probably remember some of it. In particular, I remember two parts: “I sit in one of the dives/ on Fifty-second Street/ uncertain and afraid/ as the clever hopes expire/ of a low dishonest decade” and this imperative: “We must love one another or die.” Auden composed it as the Nazis Blitzed his native England, but on the day I heard Simon read it, it felt new. It felt exactly how I felt, but was unable to say. And that is the value of poetry: it is a bridge across silence.

Most often we encounter poetry collectively, as part of life’s big events. Sometimes those events are national catastrophes, but more often they are local and personal. Weddings bring out sonnets by Shakespeare or Elizabeth Barrett Browning; for funerals there is the twenty-third psalm. On these occasions our feelings sometimes overwhelm us, and in our silence we reach for a poem to speak in our place.

And then there are our entirely personal, blind silences, the ones we keep with ourselves.  They are invisible until something happens to reveal them. For me one such something was this poem by Catherine Rankovic, from her book Fierce Consent:

Blue Chicory

It has made its way, on wind,

far into the city, and it nods there,

on streetcorners, in what July wind

its slips garner. Since childhood

I have loved it, it is so violet-blue,

its root, its marrow, so interred,

prepared to suffer, impossible to move.

Weed, wildflower, grown waist-high

where it is no one’s responsibility

to mow, its blue-white

center frankly open

as an eye, it flaunts

its tender, living lingerie,

the purple hairs of its interior.

Women are weeds and weeds are women,

I heard a woman say.

Bloom where you are planted, said my mother.

It wasn’t until I read this poem that I fully accepted that yes, I do really live in Missouri, a move I hadn’t been happy to make. I’d accepted the necessity of it; my husband had been offered a great job at a time when his prospects in Buffalo were bleak. I knew it was right to go – the offer was generous and my own skill set would make it easy for me to find work – but I didn’t want to. I would have to leave my sister and young nephews, all my poet friends. I would have to sell my little nest of a house, leave a job I felt good about doing. I would have to pull up all my roots and trust I could flourish in a place with ghastly summers and unfriendly politics. I had not a little resentment about the whole process.

But until I read Rankovic’s poem, I hadn’t been honest with myself about that resentment. Her poem broke me open, helped me to realize that I am as stubborn as any tap-rooted weed. At the same time it suggested that I, too, might bloom again on the streetcorner where I’d landed, having “made [my] way, on wind,/ far into the city” of St. Louis. Which is, of course, exactly what happened once “Blue Chicory” broke the silence I’d been keeping with myself. I’d call that invaluable.