The Poem as Blessing

I read a brief but profound reflection on poetry that enlivened my hope for making meaningful poems in 2009. "American Poetry Review" featured an excerpt from Stanley Kunitz's 1994 address to St. Mary's College, Maryland, on the back cover of the January/February, 2009 issue. Kunitz articulates the experience of the poem as one of reward and joy that emerges from the difficulties of the art. He finds the gift of poetry to be both life-sustaining and life-enhancing. He says, "The poem comes in the form of a blessing." The following sentences resonated deeply with my own sense of poetry, and they reveal the creative tension or synergy between technical craft and meaning.

"It is somewhat of a paradox that poets should spend a lifetime hunting for the magic that will make the moment stay. Art is that chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence. What is imagination but a reflection of our yearning to belong to eternity as well as to time?"

"Poetry. . . requires a mastery of craft, but it is more than a playground for technicians. The craft that I admire most manifests iself not as an aggregate of linguistic or prosodic skills, but as a form of spiritual testimony, the sign of the inviolable self consolidated against the enemies within and without that would corrupt or destroy human pride and dignity."

As 2009 begins, one of the things I pray for is the blessing of engaging the craft and discovering the poem and its spiritual testimony.