I feel the pressure of words, anxious to break free—to fling themselves at ancient walls, to chisel, nibble, batter, and shatter all the old understandings. I feel the desperation of words to settle—to become drops of rain pattering on railings, become the smell of a freshwater sea, and after resting a bit, to take flight on fingered-wings.
My journey to becoming a poet has been a stop-start, stumble this way and stagger that way oddity. When I was a kid I believed poetry was a broken, obsolete art characterized by pomposity, stupidity, and incomprehensible language. When I came out as a lesbian at age 28, and another lesbian introduced me to our great foremother Sappho, I discovered that not only her work, but also the work of poets like Judy Grahn, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Olga Broumas could move me in ways that no novel, no movie, no song had ever done.
I began writing poetry then. I had some immediate success, and then abruptly, I stopped. The words that dripped off my fingers scared me. I was frightened by what I was learning about myself, and by the power of what I realized I could do. That was 40 years ago.
Two years ago, the pressure of words became too great to resist anymore, and again I took up the poet’s pen. Much to my surprise, I discovered what my young self couldn’t understand: Poetry can save us. I can’t explain it any better than Olga Broumas does in her amazing poem, Artemis. Here are her last lines:
like amnesiacs
in
a ward on fire, we must
find words
or burn.