Pay Attention to the Poet

The Sacred Balance, Part V

Giving voice to Earth's voice has been a specific human task since the beginning, according to the stories we tell ourselves, the songs we sing, our rituals and our poetry. Repetition, rhythm, rhyme, patterns of gesture, movement and language: these are the ways we speak out and give coherence to experience, assert our connection with everything else. These repetitive, echoing forms of speech and movement shape meaning out of randomness, mimic and embody the cyclic, interdependent processes that create and maintain life on Earth--the web we are part of. In place of the linear time of mortality, dance and poetry beat out a circular measure, keep time with the world.

Naming a thing creates an identity; names establish values and functions, give something life, a separate existence. We are our names in ways we cannot describe; we hear ourselves called across a noisy room, we feel as though the very letters are somehow ours. Language weaves worlds of being and meaning; but this is a double-edged sword. Calling a forest "timber", fish "resources", the wilderness "raw material" licenses the treatment of them accordingly. The propaganda of destructive forest practices informs us that "the clearcut is a temporary meadow". Definition identifies, specifies and limits a thing, describes what it is and what it is not: it is the tool of our great classifying brain.

Poetry, in contrast, is the tool of synthesis, of narrative. It struggles with boundaries in an effort to mean more, include more, to find the universal in the particular. It is the dance of words, creating more-than-meaning, reattaching the name, the thing, to everything around it.

Since poetry began, poets and songwriters have been fighting the mind/body dichotomy, singing their sense of the world, of the body and spirit moving together through the world eternally. Poetry takes the fractured, mortal, longing human creature and reshapes it into be-longing. Crafted words attempt to resolve the contradictions of consciousness, catching speech (as insubstantial as air, as transitory as breath) as it comes and goes, tying it into the eternal.

Maybe the poet is gay
But he'll be heard anyway
Maybe the poet is drugged
But he won't stay under the rug
Maybe the voice of the spirit
In which case you'd better hear it
Maybe he's a woman
Who can touch you where you're human

Male, female, slave or free
Peaceful or disorderly
Maybe you and he will not agree
But you need him to show you new ways to see
Don't let the system fool you
All it wants to do is rule you
Pay attention to the poet
You need him and you know it

Put him up against the wall
Shoot him up with pentothal
Shoot him up with lead
You won't call back what's been said
You can put him in the ground
But one day you'll look around
There'll be a face you don't know
Voicing thoughts you've heard before

Pay attention to the poet
You need him and you know it

- Bruce Cockburn, January 1982

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