POETRY
IS LIKE A WILD ANIMAL
Poetry can attack injustices, without regard to pleasing the
listener
Just as a wild animal is depressed & unhappy when
trapped in a cage
Where he/she
has no freedom to roam, to explore, to follow his natural instincts
So, too, the poet is restless and even despondent when not
allowed to express
her
passion, her aspirations, her reality in words.
She longs to be heard and acknowledged in a culture that
usually ignores her.
Is she really retired, or just weary of no one listening, no
one giving her support
So she
can practice her calling, her craft?
A wild animal has mystery, grace, a presence no longer found
if her habitat is removed,
Her
survival is at risk. She is
not welcome where humans choose to encroach on her domain. So often she no longer has a place to
call home, a place where she is safe to raise her family and watch them become
independent.
The poet too can feel displaced, expected to follow the
rules that domesticate her free spirit.
If she has no mate, she must find ways to support and protect herself,
and does so however she can. Or,
as many have done, she takes her life or quietly becomes silenced.
To be a poet is often a very solitary, disciplined
existence, yet many of us yearn for community, for a sense of belonging.
We want people who care about us even if they have no idea
the passion within us.
Poets use language to create possibilities and express
feelings that many may have, but often cannot express. Only in recent decades have women poets
risen to be heard in this country.
For centuries, poetry has been the domain of men.
My
grandmother kept letters dating back to the 1700’s, and compiled them in her
eighties. They tell the stories of
so many women whose roles were defined by being wives, mothers and daughters,
with so little chance to explore the workings of their own minds beyond sending
letters that often took months to reach their kinfolk. It seems poetry was a
luxury reserved for the men like Shakespeare, Byron, Tennyson, Keats, and
Shelley. When one bears and raises
many children, or dies in childbirth or from illness, it would be tough to
access the poet within. Many of
the women English novelists remained single to give attention to their
craft. Like Jo, in Little Women,
one had to be spirited and wild to consider being an author! This paragraph belongs in an essay
someday, but is included to say there may be an ancestral thread that goes back
generations to having the discipline and inclination to write creatively. It skipped the family I grew up in, but
it is there in The Hudson Saga of my paternal grandmother because she took the
time to preserve this history.
Thank you, Nana Hatch! I
didn’t get to see your wild or free spirit, your creative side that may have
died with the wartime death of your son, my father, in 1944. Your diaries told of the deep grief you
carried, with no one to really hear you or comfort you. Some of my passion about the
devastating effect of war on families comes from personal experience.
This commentary was inspired initially by noticing how passive and inactive my indoor cat is compared to a cat in the wild, like a lion free to roam compared to being in a zoo. Also Bianca has no social life with a fellow cat, because where I live I can only have one pet, so her life is very restricted.
