Set Right by the Strangeness of Poetry—Andrew Calis

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by Andrew Calis

Recently, my daughter Lily knocked on the door of the bathroom where I was showering. She came with a gift, a poem she had written while lying in bed trying to fall asleep. It had been a particularly challenging day for me: professionally, I had had some difficult meetings; worse, the meetings caused me to be late picking up my kids from school; and when I got home, I managed to jam the garbage disposal with a hunk of metal that broke off the handle of a skillet I had been inordinately attached to. (It was part of a kitchen set, a rare gift my unsentimental dad bought me when I left home for college.) In my efforts to dislodge the broken metal, I accidentally dislodged the entire kitchen sink basin, which sank into the cabinet beneath it, gently leaking water from a pipe that I would now have to find a way to fix—at almost 9 pm on a weeknight.

Lily somehow understood I had had a rough day. Or maybe she, sensitive observer that she is, had heard my loud frustration in the kitchen, extrapolated that I needed some time and space while I tinkered and banged and prayed to St. Joseph the Worker to intercede for me. And when I had tinkered enough for the sink to be half-stable, resting on a stack of Norton Anthologies of Literature I had gotten in college, she found me and through a closed door read me her poem written on a sticky note—a prose poem that I break into lines below:

When your body 
is locked on land
with no hope, remember
that your heart has wings
that fly above your mind,
that soar above the earth. 
You have a choice.
You could keep it
locked up or
you could let it free.
You have wings.
Why not use them?

Even as a child, she intuited one of the purposes of poetry: to console and heal; to name feelings, but to do so suggestively as opposed to clinically. I love the line “wings that fly above your mind”—how it communicates the incomprehensibility of emotion. And by writing this poem, and sharing it with me, who was in need of the strange language of poetry, she helped in a small way to set things right.

I have written elsewhere that poetry can be a mode of humanizing others; but it is also a way to save — to see suffering, as my daughter saw mine, and offer hope, or empathy, or a call to action. But poetry rarely offers a thesis statement. Instead, it disorients, reorients, plays with grammar and punctuation in order to draw the subject and the object closer together or further apart. And it is above all things strange. Michael Leong says in an interview with LitHub that “Poetry acts like a wrench in business-as-usual, and we can either embrace it or tune it out, doing either at our own peril.” Its strangeness helps us to come to terms with our own incomprehensibility, our illogicalities, and fallenness.

I think of a favorite line from a favorite poem by Marianne Moore: that the mind is “conscientious inconsistency.” The mind is aware that it is always in flux, always remaking itself, something Moore’s poem re-enacts even in the space between the title and the first line, where the speaker goes from calling the mind “enchanting” to “enchanted”—a small but significant shift that moves the mind from being an attractive object to a strange, almost divine creation. The poem continues to disorient, to change its mind, with its endless list of self-contradictory similes and metaphors; she uses the word “like” five times, to say nothing of the endless list of what the mind is. In fact, the poem’s conclusive statement is one of its strangest lines: “Unconfusion submits / its confusion to proof; it’s / not a Herod’s oath that cannot change.” To end with a double-negative is to distance the poem from any clear meaning-making and to put it in a state of simultaneous certainty and uncertainty.

Because life is in a continual state of change, we need a language that participates in the change. Not always, of course. There’s just as much of a need for the sturdiness of mathematical and scientific language and thought. But in order to process the strangeness of the world, we need something like poetry, which Percy Bysshe Shelley writes, “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” Poetry exists within every person and is “connate with the origin of man,” that is, existing within us at the moment of our birth. How can it be that all people are poets? It’s because, he writes, “language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful.” Language is poetry. It is, as he writes elsewhere in the essay, “the expression of the imagination.” And while Shelley likely would not have seen it this way, as the avenue to the true and the beautiful, poetry participates in the salvation of the soul and lifts the soul toward heaven, taking the inexpressibility of imagination and putting it into language—a language made to share wonder.

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This attitude toward poetry might feel thickly academic: impersonal, intellectual, irrelevant to our daily lives. But poetry is quite the opposite. As my daughter Lily experienced, poetry can change the trajectory of a day. The act of reading it certainly can. But writing can be just as salvific.

In my own life, poetry has become one of my most resonant modes of prayer. I write it in my school’s chapel, as a way of making sense of the world and beauty. I write to perform an impossible task: to glimpse God; to put God into language—a language He created; to participate, in my human imperfections, in the act of creation itself.

As I said in a January Instagram interview with a writer-friend, poetry is prayer—a way to communicate with God. It relies on uncertainty, change, line breaks that revise meaning and leave the reader constantly moving between ideas and images, sounds and senses. Prayer does this too—opens the heart to images of an unfathomable God, speaks in unspoken words our needs and hurts to the Father of the Word itself. When I pray and when I write, I don’t know the outcome. I only know I’m being called to participate with a kind of desperation in a giving-over of myself. How often an image or a phrase comes to me, seemingly out of nowhere, and like a sacrament, it is a grace I can return to again and again. And returning to work I’ve written is equally redemptive—I have the chance to bring it closer to truth or goodness or beauty.

God works through these moments of prayer. He works in the silence, in the largeness of everything unmeasurable by words. Ultimately, both poetry and prayer ask for one thing: to resign yourself over to a world larger and stranger than we are, more unknowable and beautiful, full of wonder and mystery. And both ask of us to fall down in our unknowing, turn our eyes toward heaven, and to worship.

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Andrew Calis is a Palestinian-American poet and essayist. He has published in America, Dappled Things, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for various awards including the Best of the Net, Fare Forward’s poetry competition, and the Zócalo poetry prize. He lives with his family near Baltimore. Read more from Andrew on his site.

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