47.

Aging Poets

“Do you know how long it takes for any one voice to reach another?”

I’m not sure what I was looking for tonight, but I know that I was hoping to be filled with something new. One night in college I happened to wander into the Soda Center when Carolyn Forche was reading and she simply stopped time for me. I honestly did not know that words could do that. “What you have heard is true.” Stopped time. Life in my body felt different.

And then another poet came to campus. She visited my Aristotle in Modern Literature class and sat right next to me—I could have touched her shoulder with my shoulder. We had been studying Aristotle’s Poetics, memorizing and scrutinizing Aristotle’s carefully laid out formula for how poetics work. But the moment she sat next to me, poetics buzzed in my body in a way that Aristotle could not contain. That night she read her poetry with such force that we all shook a little—the people, the chairs, and even floor seemed to shake slightly when she was reading. As I sat there, I did not want it to end, and, at the same time, I wanted badly for it to end so that I could begin to live my life with this experience. Tonight, thirteen years later, she came to Tucson, again to read her poetry.

With all of the vulnerability and rejection of the job market, I went to her tonight feeling depleted. I needed for her to shake me, to stir the poetics, to tip me back in my chair and remind me of the force of the female body. But somehow in the last thirteen years she has become an old woman. She stayed seated and her voice did not carry. I could not hear her.

My poets are aging. The forces that originally brought me to writing and the teaching of writing are growing quieter. I owe it to them to try to shake the ground a little.


http://www.blueflowerarts.com/cforche.html