Poetry in Motion

Asking increasingly beautiful questions is a a fundamentally beautiful practice that poet David Whyte encourages.  His salon series, which I joined for the past year in a small company of others, was an oasis for such explorations.  Academic pursuits, like other institutionalised endeavours, can lack life's full juice - a caricature that's all head and not much else - yet poets can provide a wellspring even there. And it's vital that they do.


Taking my academic research to a Higher Education Academy dissemination event early this year, a senior academic whose name I am sorry I didn't write down, responded enthusiastically to my interest in poetry. And, to my relief, so did others.  He asked me, "Have you read Seamus Heaney's The Redress of Poetry"? I had not. "I was lucky to hear him speak.  You should get it."  So I did.

The HEA event was something of a redress itself: a chance to glimpse exceptional attention to enthralling enquiry, enquiry finding space in which to keep breathing itself alive during troubled times for thinkers of any stripe, academic or other-wise. And in Heaney's Redress I found what I had been going on about, only put much more elegantly:

"I wanted to affirm that within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing." (p201 Kindle edition).

This was implicit, he wrote, in a poem from a sequence called 'Lightenings' in his 1991 book Seeing Things.  Heaney had been considering the experience of being in two minds, of finding harmony, or not, when worldviews seem to exclude. He seemed to me to say that there might yet be fruitful redress through which different futures could be brought into being, and different relationships forged, whatever the prevailing institutional circumstance. The poem was this:

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain,

"This man can't bear our life here and will drown,"

The abbott said, "unless we help him." So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed

back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

If you think, as I currently do, that organisations are conversational creations, and leadership perhaps like-wise, then you may too be heartened to consider the sort of conversations and beautiful questions that redress might enable, and might enable redress. 

If the aridity is, however, permitted to reach tongue-stilling dimensions -- as I sometimes lose heart and believe to be true -- I then wonder what form of rain dance is needed.

It's a question for us all. What poetic practice is ours to offer, to serve good sense and wiser ways?

Seamus Heaney The Redress of Poetry: Oxford lectures. Faber and Faber.  This text contains ten lectures given while the author was Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1989-1994).

David Whyte can be found here.