I’m read­ing two books right now, Roger Rosenblatt’s Kayak Morn­ing and Venus Khoury-Ghata’s She Says (trans­lated by Mar­i­lyn Hacker). The first is a med­i­ta­tion on grief; the sec­ond, a book of poems the first sec­tion of which, “Words,” is basi­cally a mythol­o­giza­tion of lan­guage. Each of them, for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, has thrown me back onto the ques­tion of why, when I think of myself as a writer, I think of myself as a poet. Or, per­haps a more accu­rate way to ask this ques­tion is this: why, when I think about writ­ing some­thing, my first incli­na­tion, regard­less of what I want to write about, is to turn it into a poem and only after the poem or poems that I try to write fail do I even con­sider that another form might be a more appro­pri­ate choice. In “Words,” Khoury-Ghata writes:

          Words
blind flight in the dark­ness
fire­flies wheel­ing in on them­selves
peb­bles in the pocket of an absent­minded dead man
pro­jec­tiles against the ceme­tery wall
they broke up into alpha­bets
ate a dif­fer­ent earth     on each continent

There is some­thing about the way writ­ing a poem focuses my atten­tion on words, not on con­tent per se, but on the mean­ing and sound and rhythm of indi­vid­ual words, and how they join to cre­ate sen­tences that also have mean­ing and sound and rhythm, and how the form of a poem – whether the verse is for­mal or “free” (which is really just another kind of form) – shapes that mean­ing and sound and rhythm into a music that, in turn, both shapes and tran­scends the over­all con­tent that is the aggre­gate of these mean­ings and sounds and rhythms. There is some­thing about all this, and I think Khoury-Gata has cap­tured it in her sec­ond line, “blind flight in the dark­ness.” Fol­low­ing the forms of lan­guage for their own sake is a kind of blind flight because forms are con­stantly evolv­ing and you never know where they will take you, and then to be blind in the dark, which makes the dark redun­dant because even if it is lifted, you would not be able to see what is in front of you – or does the line mean that it is the dark­ness that blinds you?

Words do blind us. At the same time, though, with­out words we would live in the dark­ness of see­ing and know­ing with­out being able to name what we see and what we know; and so dark­ness would also be silence, and silence, ulti­mately – or, rather, the ulti­mate silence – is death. And so words are “peb­bles in the pocket of an absent­minded dead man.” They do him no good. And words are “pro­jec­tiles against the ceme­tery wall,” that with which we try to shat­ter the silence of death, not just in the very nar­row sense of want­ing our words to out­live us – and all of us, not just writ­ers, want some­one to remem­ber who we were after we are gone, to keep alive in their own lives the words we used in ours – but also in the here and now, the con­ver­sa­tions we have, the jokes we tell, the bar­gains we strike, the loves we pro­fess, because each of those uses to which we put our words is a way of insist­ing, affirm­ing, prov­ing that both we and the peo­ple to whom we are talk­ing are here, that we and they exist, that we are in rela­tion to them and that this rela­tion­ship is pre­cious, cru­cial, the oppo­site – or at least an attempt to be the oppo­site – of a “blind flight into darkness.”

Even oppres­sive lan­guage, the lan­guage of the oppres­sor, par­takes in this dynamic. I do not mean by this that oppres­sive lan­guage is any less unjust than it is, or that it is not often deadly, lit­er­ally fatal, to those who are being oppressed, or that it should some­how be accom­mo­dated, or fought against any less strongly because it is part of this dynamic. I mean merely to acknowl­edge the fact that the lan­guage of oppres­sion, in its very exis­tence, demon­strates that the oppres­sor needs the oppressed, that, with­out the oppressed, the oppres­sor would not, could not, exist. I know this is not a new idea, but it’s one that I think about when I ask myself why I am a poet, because I do see my work as being in oppo­si­tion to the lan­guage of oppres­sion, and then I think, What would it mean for me as a poet if sud­denly there were no oppres­sion to oppose? On the one hand, this is a mean­ing­less ques­tion. Oppres­sion is not going to dis­ap­pear overnight. On the other hand, though, I don’t know how to think about myself as a poet and about my rela­tion­ship to lan­guage with­out ask­ing it.

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In Kayak Morn­ing, Roger Rosen­blatt writes, “All I have to keep me afloat, all I have ever had, is writ­ing.” In the most imme­di­ate sense, he is talk­ing about how writ­ing has helped him deal with the death of his daugh­ter, but he also means it more broadly, in terms of his life in gen­eral; and it is in this lat­ter sense that I iden­tify with him. Writ­ing poetry quite lit­er­ally saved my life. When I was col­lege fresh­man, I went through a period of deep, deep depres­sion. I remem­ber spend­ing hours on the phone with a friend of mine from high school, talk­ing about how point­less my life felt, how point­less I felt. In one of those con­ver­sa­tions, she asked me, sim­ply, “Are you writ­ing?” I told her no. “Maybe you should be,” she said. She was the only per­son in the world at that time who could’ve known to say such a thing, and so I lis­tened to her, and I started writ­ing again Not poems, or at least not good poems. Just ram­blings that I some­times chopped up into lines. But the ram­blings, even more than talk­ing to her, made me feel less alone, less estranged from myself – which was where my lone­li­ness was com­ing from – and I felt stronger, strong enough at one point to tell my friend I loved her. It was the first time I’d ever said those words to another human being and meant them as much for myself as for the other per­son. It didn’t mat­ter to me what my friend said back; it just felt good to love her, to know the feel­ing as love – to name it, in other words – and to name it to her as being for her. It would be some time before I wrote the poem for her that was rooted in that love, and it was a love she would even­tu­ally reject, but when she told me she loved me too at the end of that phone con­ver­sa­tion, I knew I would survive.

And so I can think of no bet­ter answer to the ques­tion that is the title of this post except to say that poetry, more than any other genre in which I have writ­ten, has given me the strength to say what I need to sur­vive.