Picnic, Lightning
For someone who writes poetry every week, I confess that I don’t do a whole lot of poetry reading. I have always struggled with a sort of literary echolalia, an inability to get the voices of other writers out of my mind when I’m trying to write. Reading the work of strongly-voiced writers makes this difficulty worse.
However, replacing that issue with non-reading activities isn’t necessarily healthy, either. Fast food (read: YouTube videos) fills you up, but it doesn’t nourish.
So lately I’ve started a little practice, just a tiny one: reading one poem every morning. Compared to some ardent readers I don’t have a lot of poetry books, but I have more than one by various poets I like, so I figured one poem a day would be easily accomplished, moving my way through my collection like a pilgrimage.
I’m starting easy: with Picnic, Lighting by Billy Collins, whose poetry I love because it’s the closest thing I’ve ever come to feeling like I’m having a quiet conversation with a poet. I’ve read Picnic, Lightning cover to cover several times since I first purchased it years ago, because it’s a slim volume and you can read through it fairly quickly in one sitting, if that’s what you’re after.
But I’ve never read one poem a day, taking them like a vitamin. Swallowing the words, closing the book, and letting them work on me all morning, supplementing my nourishment for the day. It’s been a very revealing practice.
The Ghost In The Machine
My husband and I found ourselves talking about generative AI the other night. He has a background in tech, and neither of us are especially technology-averse, but we are also both creative people, and the idea of generative AI leaves us disquieted in ways that are hard to explain. We see the possibilities, certainly, but also the pitfalls.
In our recent conversation, we were discussing how generative AI could eventually make the human writing of certain things obsolete, like radio-friendly pop songs (for example). A computer could easily find the “formula” for such songs—especially the ones that are not very lyrically complex—and replicate them.
As we were talking, it finally hit me. What’s missing in a computer.
It’s poetry. Not “poetry” as in the ability to rhyme; a computer could certainly figure that out.
But poetry, as in the idiosyncratic ability to connect two unalike things and make the connection feel relatable.
At its best, poetry is the journey from one place to another in a way that you can feel rather than intellectualize. One of the things I love about Billy Collins and his poetry is the way he starts with one image and takes you on a short walk through his mind, landing in another destination altogether within only a few stanzas, but you can feel the connection between the start and the end, even if it’s not obviously connected.
As a fellow human, you get it.
Human to human, we can take each other’s hands and walk each other through an inner journey. Good poetry is, at its heart, a very human experience. That’s what makes bad poetry so obvious: it doesn’t feel human.
Genius
I recently learned that the word genius doesn’t mean “a rare, high-level smart person”. Granted, that’s how we use it these days because the use of words evolves over time, but that’s not originally what it meant.
A “genius” is a guiding force, an innate spirit. It’s the essence of a thing. You can see it in the root “gen-” like Genesis and generation and generative. It’s where things begin. Creativity, wisdom, understanding.
I talk a lot about how storytelling is a human birthright. But I think what I mean is that we all have genius…it’s something you’re born with, that sliver of God in each of us, His breath and Creator-heart that animates us.
The words “made in the image of God” fall easily from our lips, but we are not simply static portraits of our Creator. We—every human on earth—move and breathe and act with His genius inside of us.
This is why it is a deeply-held belief of mine that dehumanization is the wicked womb of so many of the worst sins. When we look at someone and boil them down, remove their nuance, and strip them of their genius because of who they are, what they believe, how they behave, or whatever reason we dream up, we are ignoring the sliver of God in them, the thing that animates them, the innate Spirit of what makes us all so idiosyncratic. What makes us poetry.
When we deny the genius of the other, we blaspheme against the God whose face they bear.
And I know. There are people in our lives we can’t easily see as having genius. People who annoy us. Vapid people. Frivolous people. Frustrating people. People who say horrible things, or behave in horrible ways. But they, too, have genius, no matter how much we want to deny it. They, too, live out the human journey from one stanza to the next, just like we do. We may disagree with them, even choose to turn away from them. But we cannot deny our shared humanity, no matter how fallen.
As I read one poem every day, I am reminded of the vastness of the human story contained in the tiny space between the lines. Our strange, our silly, our sorrow, our sacred.
And there, in that space, I find the breath of God.
I find genius.
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You’re the second person I’ve seen use the fast food comparison. Another writer I admire just shared a video about content gluttony, mindlessly consuming media rather than thoughtfully watching, listening, and reading. Interesting stuff!
Thank you for sharing. The next revelation is to recognize that there is no “other.” It is only us.