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# Learning To Love The Questions: What Do We Mean When We Say Poetry Can Change The World?
- URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/learning-to-love-the-questions-what-do-we-mean-when-we-say-poetry-can-change-the-world/
- Published: 2026-11-13T21:42:10.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-13T21:42:10.000Z
- Description: A monk, however, is still male and that maleness is the boundary the speaker does not allow himself to cross, even as he recognizes his own the capacity for opening up to the greater “fullness” that might turn him into a woman.
- Author: Richard Jeffrey Newman
- Tags: Blog, Learning To Love The Questions, Writing

When I was an undergraduate, I spent a great deal of time playing piano in the music department’s practice rooms, sometimes with a small cassette recorder so I could listen afterwards to what I’d played. Since I didn’t read music well and had no real interest in developing a repertoire, I mostly improvised. More often than not, I was surprised at how much I liked what I heard, at how so much of what I recorded sounded like it might have been composed beforehand. Inspired, I enrolled in a composition class for non-music-majors, and I can still play part of the piece I had to produce for my final project. I didn’t pursue any other music classes, but one thing from that semester has stayed with me. Mozart, the graduate assistant teaching the class said, had so thoroughly explored the limits of tonality that he approached in some of his pieces the kind of atonality we would typically associate with twentieth century music.

I have no idea if I have accurately remembered what that TA said, but I have held onto my version of it because I am fascinated by the idea that something we usually think of as the avant-garde—a perhaps necessary but nonetheless fracturing rupture of artistic convention—could emerge organically, as a logical extension of an artist’s practice, rather than from an imposed rejection of that practice’s relevance. Artistic practice, of course, is not only about how an artist works the formal elements of their medium; it’s also about how, through that medium, they map the emotional and intellectual terrain their art stakes out. I thought about this recently after reading Philip Booth’s poem, “Lines From an Orchard Once Surveyed by Thoreau:”

> I’ve lived by the world’s rules  
> long enough. That season is over.  
> There’s no ladder, no word that the bees  
> haven’t already given. My feet  
> press cider back to the roots.  
> The orchard quiets; I sip  
> at its silence, letting the nectar  
> change me. What else  
> need I know, when there’s  
> nothing to know, save  
> for the wisdom of trees?  
> I conduct myself like a naked monk.  
> Were I to open to any more  
> fullness, I think I’d  
> turn into a woman.

If manhood and masculinity—the “world’s rules” by which the speaker has lived—together represent the “tonality” of male identity, then by the poem’s conclusion the speaker is standing at tonality’s edge, able to see across that boundary, and therefore to grasp intellectually, what an “atonal” male identity might look like. My metaphor is not perfect, of course, since “turn\[ing\] into a woman” would be more like “changing keys” than slipping off the constraints of “gender tonality” altogether. Nonetheless, if you consider that in 1970, when this poem was first published, Philip Booth did not have the vocabulary of gender fluidity available to him, it’s not hard to hear in the poem’s final three lines that the speaker, and therefore the poet, is on the brink of moving into a new emotional and intellectual territory in a way that is analogous to what my music teacher suggested about Mozart in his work.

Booth’s poem opens with two lines the speaker of which is ambiguous:“I’ve lived by the world’s rules/long enough. That season is over.” Regardless of whether you understand those words as belonging to the human presence within the poem or to the orchard itself, however, what they reject is the husbandry necessary for production, whether that means the fruit the orchard is supposed to bear or the fruit of the speaker’s labor. Interestingly, that rejection is presented not as the result of a critique, of flaws in the world’s rules that make them no longer viable, but of their season being past, of it being time for a new set of rules to take over. Those new rules require the speaker—who by the end of the fourth line becomes unambiguously human—to close the distance the old rules had imposed between him and the land. He does this by allowing the “nectar” of the orchard’s “silence” to change him until he can be with the trees and allow them to be nothing more than trees, not an exploitable means of production.

The moment the speaker achieves that level of awareness is the moment he can “conduct \[himself\] like a naked monk”—like, in other words, someone who has disavowed the rules governing worldly pursuits and possessions and who, being in his natural state (naked), is able more completely to open himself to the natural state of the orchard, and therefore the world. A monk, however, is still male and that maleness is the boundary the speaker does not allow himself to cross, even as he recognizes his own the capacity for opening up to the greater “fullness” that might turn him into a woman. Here too, though, there is some ambiguity. It isn’t clear whether the speaker’s recognition of that capacity is an anxiety-filled prelude to embracing it or a warning against that embrace.

Gender politics, however, is not the primary reason I find this poem worthy of attention. Rather, it’s the way the poem arrives at a moment of gender ambivalence and ambiguity as the logical result of the integrity and vulnerability with which Booth opened himself to the material that was his to write about. To return to the metaphor with which I began, Booth’s commitment to his art brought him in this poem to the edge of both the “tonality” within which he’d been writing and the “key signature” that had shaped his identity. In this way, “Lines From an Orchard Once Surveyed by Thoreau” embodies why poetry can and does matter in the lives of ordinary people, what we mean when we say that art can change the world. It is an example I continue to try to emulate.