Poetry As A Personal Practice of Hope
I’ll tell you the truth: I’ve grown tired of hope.
Hope has felt like a threadbare concept, worn thin by the traffic of too many expectations. Or worse, a word that embodies wishful thinking disconnected from the harsh, heavy pain of the world.
But as my team at the Gladis has generously traded information around the notion of hope, I’ve felt myself becoming willing to entertain, and welcome, a fresh take. As someone who loves poetry, I became even more intrigued when I considered the connectivity between this art form and whatever it is that we label ‘hope’.
The more time I’ve spent puzzling over the questions of hope—what is it? why do I care? how does it help?—, the more I’ve felt like a curious kid who has tripped across a sparkly rock along a winding, gravel road. I keep twisting this treasure to catch the light…and I see something new every time.
has done a beautiful job offering definitions of hope in a recent article. I’m so grateful she pursued many interpretations of this far-reaching word because it has pushed me to stay attuned to the expansiveness of hope. As bell hooks teaches in All About Love: New Visions,“Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.”
Exploring slant-side expressions of the meaning of hope keeps me tethered to the kind of collective imagination our world is keening for. And poetry partners with it all.
In the past, I’ve accepted a simplistic definition of hope—something along the lines of “light in the darkness.” That characterization became useless when the lights I was used to, whether in the global community, personal relationships, or familiar perspectives, sputtered and went out. I’ve had to hunt up a new articulation in the face of a new kind of darkness.
The good news? Hope seems at home in the dark. Hope is not what I’ve pictured in the past—cheerful, soft, sweet, or even comfortable sensibilities. Often, the untameable thing that acts most like the hope I want to have is abrasive and scours a veneer of false tranquility right off my surfaces. Hope is not docile or domesticated. She cannot, nor does she attempt to, erase horror; but it seems she can and will accompany me within the horror.
I used to be afraid of the dark and what lurked in it. I grew up assured by the leadership around me that darkness was where the danger was. What they forgot to teach, or acknowledge, is that the darkness is not what we must fear—what we do with the darkness is what makes or breaks us.
I’ll probably never be completely comfortable with the dark, but I have accepted it and its inevitability, its potential, even its chill. The archetypes of the underworld, of Hadean encounter, of Plutonian transformation, have been teaching me that the darkness, both inner and outer, must be met. There is no hidden route around it. And perhaps it is even worth welcoming for the sake of the core of me, the part that most deeply wants to be alive.
Where does hope come in?
I’m finding hope to be the conscious alchemizing of darkness. Hope does not deny the reality of the darkness, but instead chooses to translate shadow into words, and to transmogrify the lack of light into the next iteration of a becoming. For me, this intentional translation of darkness must stem from the vital understanding that the darkness is my own. All the fear and all the hostility and all the need within me is not something to be escaped but embraced. Heard. Heeded. Soothed.
Making peace with my own versions of darkness is the practice of integration. Integration, a kind of unifying of the splintered shards back into the mirror, is the pathway forward into an imagination that can liberate me, as both a separate and connected being. To echo bell hooks via Lucille Clifton, “We cannot create what we can’t imagine.” Liberating our inner self goes hand-in-hand with the process of cultivating collective liberation because it is often how we first learn the taste of unfettering.
I see peace with darkness as inextricably linked to hope. Ultimately, to refuse to engage the darkness is to divorce hope from half her power. Just like the relationship between light and darkness is synergetic, dialogue with darkness enables hope to step into her strength in the cycle of life. Not as cure, but as companion.
Hope is so much more than a candle inside the cave. It is accepting the darkness of the cave, and all the things hidden in it, as mine to know. Claiming what is mine is agency; agency is liberation.
Perhaps this is why poetry matters. Poetry is artistic agency. It is also honesty. This is not because poems depends on factual narrative, but because they excavate internal truths about emotion, motivation, disappointment, expectation, desire, lack, fear, goodness, loss, and all the rest of the bewildering experience of being human. Like hope, poetry is not afraid of the dark.
Poetry is a concrete method of alchemizing the darkness, specifically through the process of naming it. V (formerly Eve Ensler), of The Vagina Monologues fame, has said,
“I have always been obsessed with naming things. If I could name them, I could know them. If I could name them, I could tame them. They could be my friends.”
To V’s point, there are myriad fairy tales in which the enemy is overpowered through the discovery of their true title…and naming things is what poetry does best. This art form provides language for the things that still need identification—my woundings, my losses, the doorways I’ve yet to draw. Poetry narrates the shadows, plus all the shades of gray.
Perhaps poetry is my way of making peace with all the monsters. Poetry is renaming, and renaming is power, and power is the potential for shift and movement. The existence of poems that deal with our darkness proves that we can stand toe-to-toe with The Thing—the Impossible Grief, the Wildfire Rage, the Total Shattering—stare into its soul, name it, and survive. To me, that is what hope feels like.
Poetry, then, is the crafting of hope straight from our own inner territories.
Writing poetry can be a kind of sheltering container for the flint-and-steel moments that start fires within us; it can also protect and feed young flames attempting to grow. And when a fire goes out, poetry offers us a safe place to spread the ashes. This is the alchemical aspect of poetics, not only writing it, but also reading/hearing it. Poetry is the very literal creation of something meaningful, even beautiful, out of pain, trauma, emptiness, or grief. This is hope kept alive.
To push this descriptive envelope a little further, hope always seems pointed in the direction of freedom, through both imagining it and seeking to achieve it. I believe the practice of poetry, too, is the practice of freedom; whether through writing, reading, speaking, or listening, poetry offers her students possibility. Free verse poetry, which does not have specific requirements for meter or construction, is an obvious example. But form poetry can also be a way of practicing freedom, with the unique condition of creation within the confines of limitation—just as in our daily lives.
Anything is possible on the page. The only limitations are those of the language, the (chosen) form, and what we accept in our minds. At its core, poetry is also play. It’s experimentation, and lightness (and in a refreshing turn of events, nothing terrible happens if we get it wrong). These are beautiful ingredients for a sturdy kind of hope.
Most crucially, poetry is a way of using our voice.
To say all the things we wanted to say, and couldn’t, or didn’t. To speak the world we’re longing for into the first echo of existence. There is safety for our voices in poetry. We are given the opportunity to tell or conceal our stories in a way that prose does not quite have the capacity for. Making use of our voices is a key capable of unlocking hope’s every level.
Poetry alone certainly cannot save the world. But it has saved me - in offering an intentional way to use my voice, a way to cultivate imaginative honesty, and a fresh means of welcoming the darkness. In the marathon of liberation, perhaps poetry is one of the small, simple practices that builds in us the stamina to run the whole race. Maybe hope is the reason we run, and poetry is how we pass the baton to one another.
Our team and my friends on social media (thank you!) have curated a reading and listening list for those interested in beginning/continuing a practice of poetry. May you find words to cultivate joy, and anger, and justice, and sufficiency, and hope in you.
READING/LISTENING LIST
Poems:
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (audio)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (text)
black aphrodite entertains a mortal lover by Saida Agostini (text & audio)
ectopic by Tyler Mills (text & audio)
Breaking News by Noor Hindi (text & audio)
won’t you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton (text)
Hope is the Thing With Feathers by Emily Dickinson (text)
Black Rook in Rainy Weather by Sylvia Plath
Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limón (text & audio)
The World Has Need of You by Ellen Bass (text)
The Thing Is by Ellen Bass (text)
Today My Hope is Vertical by Jane Hirshfield (text & audio)
Collections:
Original Fire by Louise Erdrich
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo
The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde
New and Selected Poems, Vol. One by Mary Oliver
Beyond the Limit: Poems by Irina Ratushinskaya
Amanda was supported in this article by and