It may be that the poem is an anachronism of being-oriented impulses. It is an anachronism because it reminds us ironically that we stand at the point of all possibilities yet feel helpless before the collapse of the future-sustaining emblems of our lives. This has reduced us to life in an instantaneous “now.” The time of the poem answers this more and more by allowing an expansion of the “now.” It allows consequence to disparate and contradictory elements in life. The “I,” reduced to insignificance in most spheres of contemporary society, is again able to inhabit a small arena of its own making. It returns us, from the captivities of what we do and make, to what we are. (115)
The “future-sustaining emblems” to which Gallagher is referring are those symbols of stability, those structures such as marriage, family, and career that we have traditionally deemed significant and used to define ourselves—and which we are now losing. And the “the point of all possibilities” is Gallagher’s term for how time works in a poem:
the point at which anything that has happened to me, or any past that I can encourage to enrich my own vision, is allowed to intersect with a present moment, as in a creation, as in a poem. And its regrets or expectations or promises or failures or any suppositions I can bring to it may give significance to this moment that is the language moving in and out of my life and my life as it meets and enters the lives of others. (107)
So the poem helps us to inhabit the moment, not just pass through it into the next one. It gets back to trees, too: deeply rooted, stretching outward and upward, and eternally here. The tree can’t help but fully inhabit every moment. And that inhabitance, for us humans, is not a matter of eliminating regrets and failures and promises and expectations (and self-criticisms and hesitations), but of incorporating them—realizing their significance without turning them into idols, without becoming fearful or worshipful of our personal affects (I’m getting all Spinoza here). Writing a poem is about carving out a space for the “I,” with all its impurities and flaws, to inhabit.
I like all of that and find it almost satisfying. But I still think that “what we do and make” is at least as important as “what we are.” In poetry and in life more broadly. Because poems are something we make, concrete objects as far as I’m concerned, requiring labor like anything else, I’m troubled by the notion of our words existing on some separate plane of pure being removed from doing. And I suspect that isn’t even what Gallagher is after; she herself describes how language moves in and out of life. And I like idea of the poem as a sanctuary: the “small arena” one makes in which to cultivate the “now.” What really bothers me is that one line: “the captivities of what we do and make.” Do we really spend enough time genuinely doing and making things to be held captive by them? I think our captivity as a society has more to do with a lack of doing and making.
So often, the tasks with which we are burdened—in school, at work—are not integral. Genuine doing and making—growing and harvesting plants, building shelter, making clothes, clearing trails—are, like the crafting of a poem, ways of expanding the “now,” of bringing together those “disparate and contradictory elements in life” and allowing them consequence and meaning. This has to do with the meditative aspect of repeated motions, but also with the thought and care and skill involved. We spend so little time accomplishing necessary tasks, doing our own work. What I want is more of a recognition that poetry, writing it and reading it, is not a purely inward process, not entirely a process of the “I” but something more worldly, more expansive, more engaged, and more corporeal. “All forms will pass, matter alone remain”—from Wendell Berry’s translation of a poem by Pierre Ronsard. If poetry were pure form, that line would be terribly sad, fruitless and futile, a sort of “Why bother to write?” The line survives precisely because there is some matter at the heart of the poem, some craft, some consequence.
Gallagher is right to say that we ache for consequence, and that poetry can help to satisfy that ache; but her explanation of the origin of our ache is off. Being and doing need not be a case of either/or. In truth, we need more of both; and in any act of creation, we find both wrapped up with one another. What I want to work out is not how to keep doing from subsuming being, or vice versa, but how the two sustain each other—how each gives the other—gives our lives—meaning.
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