The Value of Poetry

Today, after teaching, I delved into a book that just arrived in mailbox today, a book of James Dickey's letters. The book is called Crux, after the title of the book Dickey was working on when he died. (Many people will remember Dickey as the novelist who wrote Deliverance.)

In the Introduction to the Dickey letters, the editor, Matthew J. Bruccoli reveals the last words Dickey spoke to his poetry composition students before he died, just two days later. I want to reproduce Dickey's last words to his students because I need to type them out. When I type passages out, they become a part of me. And I think some of my friends in the blogging world will be moved by Dickey's words. So many of us are striving to give ourselves to our creative lives. It's wonderful, then, to read the words of someone like Dickey, who loved poetry as he loved life. (I think you can use "poetry" interchangeably with any artistic endeavor, any act of creation).

In reading the following passage tonight, I was struck by how similar my thoughts are to Dickey's. I have discussed in my blog many times how I think art and religion are the same for me. Dickey also thought the creative life was connected somehow to God. He said the following life-affirming things even as he knew he did not have long to live. So one of the last things he talked about was the importance of poetry. Here is what he said:

When we get started, I want you to fight this thing through. Fight the thing through that we start with your own unconscious and your own dreams and see where it comes out. That's the excitement and the fun of it. Deep discovery, deep adventure. It's the most dangerous game and the best.

Flaubert says somewhere that "The life of a poet is a hell of a life. It's a dog's life. But it's the only one worth living." You suffer more, you're frustrated more. All the things that don't bother other people. But you also live so much more. You live so much more intensely and so much more vitally and with so much more of a sense of meaning of consequentiality. Of things mattering instead of nothing mattering.

This is what's driving our whole civilization into suicide. The fear that we are living an existence in which nothing matters very much or at all. ...A sense of non-consequence, a sense of nothing, nothing matters. No matter which way we turn it's the same thing. The poet is free of that. He's free of it.

To the poet everything matters, and it matters a lot, and that's the realm where we work and once you're there you are hooked. If you're a real poet you're hooked more deeply than any narcotics addict could possibly be hooked on heroin. You're hooked on something that is life-giving instead of destructive. Something that is a process which cannot be too far from the process that created everything. God's process. ...

What this universe indubitably is is a poet's universe. Nothing but a poetic kind of consciousness could have conceived of anything like this. That's where the truth of the matter lies. You are in some way in line with the creative genesis of the universe in some way, in a much lesser way of course, because we can't create those trees or that water or anything that's out there. We can't do it but we can recreate it. We are secondary creators.

We take God's universe and we make it over our way and it's different from his. It's similar in some ways, but it's different in some ways. The difference lies in the slant. The slant that we individually put on it and that only we can put on it. That's the difference and that's where our value lies. Not only for ourselves but for the other people who read us.

The other people who read us. There's some increment there that we make possible that would not otherwise be there. I don't mean to sell the poet so long or to such great length, but I do this principally because the world doesn't esteem the poet very much. They don't really understand where we're coming from. They don't understand the use for us or if there is any use. They don't really value us very much. We are the masters of a superior secret, not they. Not they. Remember that when you write. You are at the top level and they are down there with ... the general idols of the schlock culture we live in. ...

My grandmother was born in Germany and she used to quote from Goethe a lot and one of her favorite sayings was, "Whoever strives upward, him we can save." ...we must find some way to write as though our hands were the hands of someone miraculously superior to ourselves. This is what we aim for.

So when you begin to say things you didn't know you knew or you never had any idea you had any notion that you knew, then maybe you're getting somewhere you should be as a poet. Not invariably, but it's possible under those conditions. It's possible. ...