The year I was graduating from college, I went to visit an MFA program to see if I wanted to enroll there. Even though it was a 95-degree May day, the student who escorted me sported a long poetic scarf, which she wielded like an identity. Just looking at that scarf made me sweat. When I asked her if she planned to teach poetry after she got her degree or maybe go into book publishing, and if she was hoping to publish a book of poems, she waved at me and said, “Oh, I’m just here for the spiritual experience.”
I sat in on a pretty low-voltage poetry workshop–the students subdued and distracted, the instructor kindly but diffident. Nobody seemed to really like poetry much; the class felt like a required course, a prerequisite for something else unspoken. Afterward, my escort ushered me into another room, a kind of student lounge, with a couple cockroachy sofas, strewn with literary journals, their covers curling, and on the walls peeling posters for poetry readings long past. A poet was visiting for the afternoon, reading to the MFAers. I’d encountered his work in college. I thought of him as a poet of bogs and clouds, his verses nice enough but a little clammy.
In the flesh, he was a robust figure, his face Santa Claus pink, his eyes glistening, his hair graying into a halo. He smiled at us and began reading poems, in a crisp and lilting voice. I’d heard poets read before, my college teachers mostly, and they were good and inspiring. But in the drear of this lounge he grew utterly incandescent. The poems he read I remember as sorrowful, serious, the life in them ripe with solitude and rot. Yet he seemed thoroughly enlivened by the fact of reading them to us, by his awed delight that poetry existed at all and that we had the throats and mouths to speak it. I heard centuries in his voice–Yeats, bards, the storyspinners around peat fires who told clans who they were and where they came from.
I was too awed and shy to meet him afterward and thank him. But that hot May day, Seamus Heaney made me realize that poetry could take up residence in the blood, that it could resonate over time and into unlikely places, and that if we listened, it could bring us together in tragic joy.
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