Why We Must Write
~ Linda Banks, 2009
Edward Albee, the world famous playwright, once said, Writers, just like everybody else, perceive the events and happenings of the world around them, but for some reason they feel as though they must write about it.
There is a movie called Used People, set in a New York City borough, which has a wonderful scene. Two men have pulled up lawn chairs to a television set they have brought outdoors. They are watching the first moonwalk, being telecast live. Around them, their neighbors are talking, laughing, eating. Children run around with sparklers. In the center of the scene, a man looks through a telescope. He shouts, I see them! I see them! And, in his mind and heart, he could.
I believe this is what distinguishes writers from other observers. They see more deeply, beyond the visual. And the words spring from that bottomless well.
Stanley Kunitz, past US Poet Laureate, didn't see the astronauts through a telescope; he wasn't there on the moon; but he wrote about it in “The Flight of Apollo”: I was a stranger on earth./ Stepping on the moon, I begin/ the gay pilgrimage to new/ Jerusalems/ in foreign galaxies.
On Tuesday, April 15, 1997, the Dallas Morning News printed a column by Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe entitled "Hale-Bopp should inspire us."
The next time a comet comes near, the president should declare National Spaced Out Week. Cities would dim their lights by half. For views in darker countryside, gathering sites would be posted on roadsides or on the fields of kind farmers. Photo stores would loan binoculars to school groups. Teachers would put the heavens at the front and center of the curriculum.
The prime activity of National Spaced Out Week would be as simple as it gets. Look up. Turn off any radios or televisions. If you are with somebody, agree to five minutes of silence. Ask yourself questions the hyperactivity of our lives often prevents: What was here the last time the comet was here? What is here now? What will there be when it comes back and we are all toast?"
After a rather lengthy diatribe about our lack of interest in outer space, even though we live in the space age, and our lack of interest in science altogether, he gets to the heart of the article and says,
Comet Hale-Bopp provokes both the feeling of a terrible smallness and insignificance in the universe and the notion that we have a special calling to preserve what little significance we have. You confront both your mortality--you won't be here for its next orbit 2,300 years from now--and a deep sense of gratitude to your maker that you ever were around to see this thing at all.
I wasn't able to see Hale-Bopp because I live in what he goes on to call “suburbanization that obliterates the night sky.” But this article caught my eye because I had seen news on TV and photos in the paper about Comet Hale-Bopp that did inspire me. Here is my poem:
IN THE NOW
(Comet Hale-Bopp - 1997)
The sun, the moon, the earth keep measured pace,
dispense the days and nights like grains of sand.
As stellar patterns stitch each evening sky,
it falls in folds of darkness, comforting.
These are the things we earthbound mortals know,
the changeless changes of the everyday.
Beyond all this a charted course is set;
a mystic voyager appears, comes near.
The comet takes its place among the stars.
We stand below, turn faces heavenward,
and wonder at the wonder that we see.
Hundreds of years have passed since last it came
and hundreds more will pass until it comes
to blaze its trail again. The mystery
of this leaves us in awe. The tiny space
we briefly occupy seems trivial
when measured against outer space and time
that spans all history. But in this place
we know the now is part of all things past
and all things yet to come. And we rejoice.
Let me remind you of one sentence that Jackson wrote: We have a special calling to preserve what little significance we have. This is true for everyone, but what about those of us who are poets? Don't we do this every time we write anything? Our poems ARE out special calling.