Poetry is where empathy begins

I got a most remarkable, handwritten note from poet Naomi Shihab Nye after she received a copy of Life is a Verb. “We need this book,” she wrote, among many things too wonderful to say. She suggested we could start a rock band, “Digh and Nye,” and I, of course, immediately started planning for the Air Stream trailer tour she and I would take to honky tonks all across America. Watch your local paper for details.

When a woman named Mary Ann was dying here in Asheville recently, mother to Meta (the extraordinary story of whose death some of you might remember), my friend Catherine remembered that Naomi Shihab Nye had put out an album years and years ago, full of songs that Mary Ann had sung to her children when they were younger. She contacted Naomi and asked if she might call Mary Ann, that her time was short on this earth.

And so, Naomi Shihab Nye responded to a woman she had never met–never would meet–by calling Mary Ann on the last Wednesday of her life to sing to her.

I don't know Naomi Shihab Nye, but her spirit and the generosity of that phone call move me greatly. I love her poetry, and was delighted recently to find an essay of hers about poetry, from 1994. Here’s an excerpt:

Years ago a girl handed me a note as I was leaving her proud town of Albany, Texas, a tiny, lovely place far in the west of our big state. "I'm glad to know there is another poemist in the world," the note said. "I always knew we would find one another someday and our lights would cross."

'Our lights would cross.' That girl had not stood out to me, I realized, among the other upturned, interested faces in the classroom. How many other lights had I missed? I carried her smudged note for thousands of miles.

I was fascinated with the earliest poems I read and heard that gave insight into all the secret territories of the human spirit, our relationships with one another. Somehow those glimpses felt comforting, like looking through the lit windows of other people's homes at dusk, before they closed the curtains. How did other people live their lives? Just a sense of so many other worlds out there, beginning with the next house on my own street, gave me a great energy. How could anyone ever feel lonely? One of the first books I loved in my life was a thick, gray anthology edited by Helen Ferris, called Favorite Poems Old and New. I still have my early edition, though it is coming a little loose at the spine. Rich, intelligent voices spoke to me each time I opened its covers. I found Rabindranath Tagore, Carl Sandburg, Emily Dickinson, living side-by-side. I imagined I was part of a much larger family.

To me the world of poetry is a house with thousands of glittering windows. Our words and images, land to land, era to era, shed light on one another. Our words dissolve the shadows we imagine fall between. "One night I dreamt of spring," writes Syrian poet Muhammad al-Maghut, "and when I awoke/flowers covered my pillow." Isn't this where empathy begins? Other countries stop seeming quite so "foreign," or inanimate, or strange, when we listen to the intimate voices of their citizens. I can never understand it when teachers claim they are "uncomfortable" with poetry — as if poetry demands they be anything other than responsive, curious human beings. If poetry comes out of the deepest places in the human soul and experience, shouldn't it be as important to learn about one another's poetry, country to country, as one another's weather or gross national products? It seems critical to me. It's another way to study geography!

For this reason I was always carrying poems I found from other countries into classrooms where I worked as a visiting writer. If American students are provincial about the literary histories of other places, imagining themselves to be the primary readers and writers on the planet, it is up to us to help enlighten them. When I first traveled to India and Bangladesh as a visiting writer for the Arts America program of the U.S. Information Agency, friends commented helpfully upon our departure, "Why do you suppose people over there will care about poetry? They can barely get enough to eat!" Stereotyping ran rampant among even my educated community. In India, poems were shared with us which were 7,000 years old. In Bangladesh, an impromptu poetry reading was called one evening and 2,000 enthusiastic listeners showed up. Could either of those things happen in the United States?

Anyone who feels poetry is an alien or ominous form should consider the style in which human beings think. "How do you think?" I ask my students. "Do you think in complete, elaborate sentences? In fully developed paragraphs with careful footnotes? Or in flashes and bursts of images, snatches of lines leaping one to the next, descriptive fragments, sensory details?" We think in poetry. But some people pretend poetry is far away.

You can read the whole essay here.

And so, for our Poemapalooza today, a favorite poem by the Nye portion of "Digh and Nye," my rock star compatriot. She reminds us that poetry is where empathy begins. Let us not allow it to be where empathy ends.

Kindness

-Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
     purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

[image from here]