Why I write (and publish) amateur verse
It’s been a strange experience to publish this little book of poems. In part, this is because I don’t consider myself a poet. The act of making poems doesn’t define my identity, and it’s certainly not how I make a living. But it is a small yet significant part of how I make a life. Over the years, I’ve found great value in, as my professor David Lyle Jeffrey puts it, committing random acts of poetry.
If I had to distill this value to a single good, I would simply say that writing poems sharpens my perception; it’s a practice that helps me to look and to see. In his autobiographical essay “A Native Hill,” Wendell Berry describes his experience as a boy hunting with his grandfather’s hired hand and being taught how to attend. “He was a good teacher and an exacting one,” Berry writes. He demanded that the small boy be quiet and observant. Berry recalls that he “would see a squirrel crouched in a fork or lying along the top of a branch, and indicate with a grin and a small jerk of his head where I should look; and then wait, while I, conscious of being watched and demanded upon, searched it out for myself. He taught me to look and to listen and to be quiet. I wonder if he knew the value of such teaching or the rarity of such a teacher.” The discipline of writing a poem is a teacher; it prods me to slow down and to actually see what I’m looking at or experiencing.
This sharpening of perception can take many different forms. Sometimes it’s an ekphrastic poem responding to a work of art. Other times it’s a narrative poem or a lyrical one that seeks to name and give shape to an experience. In all these modes, though, I’ve been drawn to the movement conveyed in the term verse. Verse, as opposed to prose, has deliberate line breaks, places where the words turn and begin again on the next line. Verse is a way of laying different but related objects alongside one another—these might be aural echoes, analogous images, parallel or contrasting ideas—and allowing these new relationships to alter our perception of each individual object. It’s a way of attending to the surprising connections the spiderweb through the cosmos.
I write poems, then, for the same reason I take walks, go fly-fishing, and pray. These activities, each in their own distinctive ways (I’m not suggesting they are equivalent!), hone and direct my attention. They enact and deepen my membership in creation. Here, for instance, is one poem that begins with a quotidian, rather drab sight and then glimpses some unforeseen hope.
Midlife Crisis
Washing Saturday’s dishes at dusk,
I stare out blankly at summer’s detritus:
oak leaves littering the drive; a weathered,
leaning fence; browned ferns; the stunted
corn ears that never matured; the spent
and dropping echinacea whose purple petals
have faded and fallen. Then, two long
stalks plunge violently—clutched by a pair
of goldfinches who now bury their beaks
into the dark cones, rich with seed.
But just because I find writing poems beneficial for myself does not, of course, justify inflicting them on unsuspecting readers. I’ve read more than my share of bad poems, ones that may have been worth writing for the author but aren’t worth reading for others. And given that people could spend their time reading great poets, both dead ones like Dante or Milton or Dickinson or Wilbur but also living ones like Dana Gioia or A.E. Stallings, it can seem arrogant to invite them to read my own decidedly not-great poems.
Yet I regularly read and enjoy plenty of good-not-great poems myself. I’m drawn to them for the author’s voice, or the poems’ subject, or the perspective they provide. And I often find that these poems inspire me to pick up my own pen and write a few lines. Sometimes the greats can inspire imitation, but often they silence me. I know I can’t keep up with Shakespeare, so if that’s the standard I have to reach, I might as well not even try. Yet there is profound value in widespread, amateur poetry writing—poetry written for love—so if my own decent poems can spark others to write, I think that’s worth something.
More particularly, I hope these poems might inspire reflection on the arts of living well in the “far country,” as exiles east of Eden. The volume takes its title from the prefatory poem in Wendell Berry’s novel Remembering, which chronicles one character’s winding, partial journey toward home. I find that many of my poems respond, either implicitly or explicitly, to my persistent sense of displacement. There are reasons particular to my life that contribute to this sense, but in many ways, the human condition is one of exile. Each of us is homo viator. I’ll leave you with one more poem that offers an image of how we might journey well.
Dying Light
Some call this the Arsenic Hour,
others the Witching Hour, that moment
late in the day, at five or six
in the afternoon, when a tired toddler
turns into one inconsolable
wail, and the only thing that will
suffice is food, a bath, and bed.Â
On week-long road trips, the spell is stronger,
the toddler louder. But this is also
the hour when the slanting sun
illumines the soul of each autumn
tree. At the end of the year and the day—
their tired leaves bled of green—
they await this evening light to transmute
death into a peculiar beauty.Â
And even my daughter’s inarticulate frustrations—
her groans that words cannot express—
disclose her longing for a better
world. As she matures, we hope
to show her how to shape exhaustion,
to spread her arms and hold it loosely
so that, as in this maple tree,
it might become a means of grace,
transfigured by the dying light.
Jeffrey Bilbro is an Associate Professor of English at Grove City College and website Editor-in-Chief of Front Porch Republic. His books include Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, Loving God’s Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature, Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place (written with Jack Baker), and Virtues of Renewal: Wendell Berry’s Sustainable Forms.