Last Tuesday, I went to the Thirteenth Avenue Coffeehouse to pick up lunch for Nikka and me. We always lunch together on Tuesday, and I'm reminded each time that I'm lucky to have a wonderful relationship with a lovely daughter. Can I say that I hate March--not just because I'll turn 76 later in the month? The constant freezing and thawing creates a lot of ice, and a concatenation of health issues means that I'm prone to falling. I'm getting too old to fall, so I pick my routes very carefully. The sidewalk on Thirteenth Avenue where I'd parked was sheer ice, so I took the route between parked and moving cars because it was nicely gritty. When I came to the Coffeehouse, I could see they'd shoveled, so I had safe footing--until I came to the very bottom of their stairs, where rain earlier in the week had pooled and frozen in a sleek but small skating rink. But there was one spot next to the handrail that was clear, so I picked my way carefully up the stairs.
I was cheerful and pleasant as they brought my order and I finished paying. Then I said calmly "You have a large patch of ice just at the bottom of your stairs that you might want to deal with." I smiled and turned to go when two young men having lunch instantly got up. "Can I help you?" they both asked. "No, I'm good," I told them as I made my way to the door, one of them on each side of me. I quickly recognized that I couldn't hold my food, the handrail, and my cane, so I gave my bag to one of them to carry. They wanted to grasp my elbows as I went down the stairs, but the handrail is better for me. They both saw me to the bottom, and the taller of the two handed back my food. I stopped to look both of them in the eyes to say "You're great. This was so helpful." The tall one said "It took thirty seconds," and the shorter of the two said "My coaches used to say if I was sitting down, I was missing something." "Well, you didn't miss a chance to be kind," I said as I went on my way to my car.
As I pulled out and drove west on Thirteenth, the car in front of me stopped suddenly, not near an intersection. "Huh? Well, maybe the driver is deciding which way to go." I halted patiently. But the driver got out of her car and began waving at me. I rolled down my window and she yelled "There's a bag on the roof of your car." When you're dealing with a purse and a cane and getting out your keys next to moving traffic, getting recombobulated can be complicated. I'd left the food on the roof, and she had noticed it and decided to do something about it.
What an antidote to the idiot id! If you think worldwide, this cluster of kindness wasn't an anomaly. Now that I need a cane constantly, it's pretty common for me to experience kindness. While the orange oaf was bombing schools in Iran, thousands of kind things were also being done. And, according to Fix the News, hundreds of solar panels were being installed, and rewilding efforts were making progress in Europe. A river in England had been restored to its original meandering shape--not straightened to make farming easier. As drones hit buildings housing important Iranians, the river's species were happily returning. Egypt eliminated trachoma while Trump was bombing an Iranian desalination plant.
Now stay with me here, because I'm going to take a left turn and do some intricate doodling. That afternoon, I got on my exercise bike to get my steps in. I like podcasts while I work out, and Krista Tippett had launched a new season. As luck would have it, this was an interview with two poets, both of whom had been the U.S. poet laureate, Tracy K. Smith (2017-2019) and Joy Harjo (2019-2022). I recommend this podcast highly; you'll find it on the On Being website. I won't do it justice because I was peddling like mad and then stopping the bike occasionally so I could scribble down a few words that resonated.
They read from their work occasionally, but mostly they talked about the value of poetry in a time of "reckonings," though no one defined that era and no one mentioned the Orange Oaf. Perhaps because they were in a very ceremonial, public role, they thought about poetry as part of civil society. Because poetry brings a new state of mind into existence, its practice is highly individual; because it is also meant to speak to others, poetry's very existence means that we are separate and yet interconnected--all at the same time. It helps society see and accept that frame of mind. Back when I taught, I often told my students that human beings have two very basic, contradictory desires. They want to be their inimitable selves. And they want to belong. Heads in my classroom would nod, at first tentatively, thoughtfully, and then with more vigour. Poetry enacts that basic human contradiction. Joy Harjo said that poetry is also an intrinsic part of the story matrix that joins us.
Harjo was poet laureate during the shutdown for Covid, but Smith took the occasion to travel all over the country, often stopping in small towns that didn't look like poetry was one of their basic interests. Yet people came. She would read from her work and then ask the audience what they noticed. Not "What does the poem mean?"--a question we torture our students with. But "What did you notice?" She was playing into the hands of their lived experience, because what they would notice would in part be what was familiar. As people tentatively identified what they'd noticed, someone would take the opportunity to relate an anecdote that the poem had unearthed. And then others would do the same. Their stories became longer and richer. Thus the "reading" became a celebration of our various humanity.
Curiosity is a mental muscle, Smith says. I know that for years, I've relied on one of my mantras that tells me to "Just be curious." Don't leap to judgments about something that is unfamiliar or puzzling. Just be curious. It opens up the world rather than shutting me in a safe, certain, windowless box. But I don't think I realized that curiosity is a mental muscle that can atrophy if we don't feed it with surprises. Poetry inherently keeps that mental muscle alive. Because poetry is inherently contradictory, or, I would say open-ended, it keeps a certain limber kind of thinking alive that sees contradiction as part of our experience of daily life and as part of our humanity--part of our own experience of the world and part of our relationships with others.
Is there such a thing as a poetry of gesture? How can I explain that the people that helped me last Tuesday were creating little haikus of connection that were beautiful and fleeting? They had observed something others might not see. It began with curiosity: might that small, silver-haired woman with a cane need some help? What is that bag doing on the roof of the car? But then they created a transitory connection where nothing had been before. Dacher Keltner, the world expert on awe, did a vast, multicultural study that revealed what prompts us to feel awe. Would it surprise you to know that moral beauty is number one and nature number two? "Moral beauty" appears when someone does something kind, compassionate, even self-sacrificing. It can be saving someone's life at the risk of your own--an epic poem. It can be a small act of kindness that briefly diverts you from your twenty-first century rush to get things done--an unassuming haiku, stark in its brevity.
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