A Violence Without

By Matt Rader

Recently, I had the opportunity to return to the high school I graduated from in the Comox Valley and speak to Grade Eleven English students about poetry. As it happened, the classroom I spoke in was the same classroom I took Literature Twelve in and where I first read Chaucer, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, etc. Many things have changed in that classroom, but I am pleased to report the carpet remains the same unnameable pattern of oranges and browns and blacks. It was a good experience for me being back there and facing those young people, but there are many things about poetry and poems I did not say and wish I did. Here are few of those things:

I have a difficult time being a cheerleader for poetry. As much as I love some poems, most poetry leaves me cold.

But it's more than that. The best poems are not engaged in a competition. There is no singular victory they must achieve. We do not need to get drunk and cheer poetry on to make it continue. The best poems do not come down on one side or the other.

The best poems celebrate "the drunkenness of things being various." And at the same time "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things." The best poems can't be nailed down.

But the best poems are not ambiguous. The best poems are particular. They do not want to be one thing, but they do not want to be everything, either. Everything is just one more singularity (Think of the word "universe." Now think of the word "unicycle.")

The best poems appeal to your body. To your senses through your imagination and through the sounds the words make in you mouth and your head and your throat. The world appeals to your body. You know everything you know through your body. The best poems are like the world.

Poems require courage. When they are revelatory, they are only revelatory to those with the courage to see what has been revealed. When they are pure delight, they are only delightful to those with the courage to be delighted. When poems are transformative, they are only transformative to those with the courage to be transformed.

Wallace Stevens wrote that poetry is "a violence within protecting us from a violence without," a typical Stevensian move--the word "without" in this context can mean both what comes from outside oneself and the absence of poetry, or "a world without poetry"--and Seamus Heaney, paraphrasing him, called poetry, "our imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality."

I write poems to tell the story of my life to myself.