“It is done the hand that hovers eternally points its long finger and touches the body.”
— Amanda Johnston
“My mind alongside their minds
was less alone, less singular —
that everywhere I looked
I was a terrible window”
— Sasha West
One can learn much eavesdropping on two women, one Black, one white, as they engage in intense conversation. Each speaks with passion but listens with equal enthusiasm, allowing the other to explore her thoughts — to conjure what both eventually give a nod to: A shared wisdom.
Knowing they’re poets, who’ve won the praise of other poets, provides a clue to the empathy beneath this easy give and take. The sense that their words might any minute merge to release the keening voice of mystery keeps one’s ears attuned.
I had such an opportunity several weeks ago at a place on the eastside of town — one I never knew existed: the Museum of Human Achievement. The name fit for what these poets were up to that evening.
That’s why, as we at St. James’ Episcopal Church began to prepare for our fifth poetry, jazz and live painting performance, I thought to invite Amanda Johnston, our current Texas poet laureate, and Sasha West, winner of the Texas Institute of Letters award, to join the collaboration in our sanctuary. Johnston has another engagement, but West will be there.
This date marks the anniversary of the launch of two national events from 1967 on opposite sides of the country. “The Summer of Love” in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco was a response to our U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam. “The Summer of Soul” in Harlem in New York City focused on love, hoping to generate “self-love” among the African American and Hispanic residents of that community by showcasing an amazing array of performances by African American and Hispanic artists.
“A Dozen Texas Voices Swing in the Key of Summer Love” at St. James' hopes to emulate both these intents as our multicultural band of artists from Houston, San Antonio and Austin celebrate the power of love.
Is it naive to believe that poetry can provide sufficient potency to offset such threats to love and peace? The historian Ken Burns, recently quoted novelist Richard Powers during his commencement address at Brandeis University: "The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story."
Can a good poem render the same effect? I invited our two lauded poets to weigh in.
If people are afraid of poetry, what hope does a poem have of changing anything?
Johnston immediately took issue with this perspective, suggesting, “It’s not poetry people fear but judgement — the shame of not getting it, but also fear of the feelings the poem evokes in them.”
West said, “something happens to your body when a poem affects you.”
Johnston continued: “This is part of an entire cultural stigma attached to poetry, one that’s designed to disrupt the poetic process.”
“Yes, that’s why dictators fear poetry,” West said. Poets like Dennis Brutus in South Africa, Fyodor Dostoevsky in Russia, Liu Xiaobo in China, Nazim Hikmet in Turkey, and Federico Garcia Lorca in Spain had all been imprisoned for allegedly subverting existing repressive regimes with their writing.
What power does poetry have in the midst of existing power structures?
“Poetry is able to hold contradiction and give us space to explore that contradiction,” West said. "It points to something giant and draws us into it.”
Johnston offered the famous statement of James Baldwin: "I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her."
Johnston continued: “The power of poetry begins when you first see yourself creating to meet that power and continues when you share your words and find your people — those who witness your creation and engage with it, making community in the process —– providing the connections.”
West: “The greatest power of poetry resides in its capacity to attend. For example, in the writing of my poetry collection on climate change, I discovered myself attending to the zone of sacrifice: that which factories and developers feel free to ignore, but the poet cannot: The laborer’s hand lost in a machine, the polluted river, the displaced indigenous people; you start with one incident and show through verse its connection with the larger world.”
Johnston: “We are trained as poets to pay attention to everything and to every part of our poem … even the white space.”
How does this gets us to love?
West: “Because the things we return to are the things we care about, it’s almost like worship services that one regularly attends to call one back to what matters.”
Johnston: “I come back to that James Baldwin quote I shared: 'challenging comes out of fierce love.'”
What I took from my conversation with these remarkable women in the end was that poetry does not just rhyme. When we enter the mystery it paints with words, we find we rhyme as well — with each other and with all within and outside our world.
I could not help but think of the jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, whose hit album “Take Five” drew our attention to the timing of things — the rhythmic patterns leading him to a conclusion about the music he loved:
Brubeck wrote: "One of the reasons I believe in jazz is that the oneness of humanity can come through
its rhythm — the rhythm of the heart … the first thing you hear when you’re born or before
you were born — and it’s the last thing."
It’s true for the internal rhyme of poetry, too. Put poetry and jazz together and there’s no telling the connections we might discover to the life around us with its capacity to pound out the power of love.
Terry Dawson is a retired Presbyterian minister who serves as editorial writer for the online journal Faith on View. He’s the 2024 winner of the Hotpoet Equinox Prize for Poetry and his book the after; poems only a planet could love (Poets’ Choice) can be found on Amazon.com.
A Dozen Texas Voices Swing in the Key of Summer Love
An evening of poetry, jazz and live painting with 12 award-winning poets from Houston, San Antonio and Austin and the Joe Morales Trio and Chris Rogers.
St. James Episcopal Church, 1941 Webberville Road, Austin TX 78721
6-9 p.m. June 22
Free performance and dinner from the Richard S. Reynolds Foundation
Register at Eventbrite.com.
