Love, Sweet Love - When Poetry Matters More Than Policy

An essay on needing love, solving big problems and texting in Barcelona.

Photo credit: Alexis Brown

‘What the world needs now
is love, sweet love
No not just for some but for everyone’ 
- Jackie DeShannon, 1965

Recently I flew with my teenage son to Spain where he was preparing to spend a year in international exchange. We arrived in Barcelona and I did everything I could to get him settled. I applied for his youth transit card so he could ride the metro and buses. I got his US transcripts translated and certified.  I connected with a doctor’s office and met with the counselor of his new school. 

I did everything a mother’s supposed to do…but somehow, I couldn’t tell how he was doing. Or rather, he didn’t want to communicate with me.  

“How was school today? How are you feeling about all of this?” I asked him every day for the first two weeks. 

“Fine, you don’t need to ask me that all the time”, he responded.

One afternoon I was organizing his desk, shuffling through his papers. I saw a half written poem, titled I am From, surely an assignment for his English Literature class. I recognized the title from my own school years, an adaptation of George Ella Lyon’s poem Where I’m From. Inspired by the poetry of a friend in Tennessee, Lyon wrote Where I’m From using simple language and images to communicate identity and belonging, shared in the way people have always told the stories of the places they come from. My son’s poem described the smell of his grandmother’s homemade paella, the earthquake of his grandfather’s laugh, the redwood tree in our front yard. 

“I saw your poem”, I said to him, “I really liked it, I hope you’ll finish it. Send it to me when it’s done”. 

A day or two later he texted me with a screenshot of a poem. Absence by Walter Savage Landor. He liked it, he said, because it was about being far from home.

“Now it’s your turn mom”.

I sent Langston Hughes’ Harlem, he sent Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, I responded with Ada Limon’s The Quiet Machine, and we kept going. With each poem we shared why we chose it and what we liked about it. It became our way of thinking about each other and communicating something about ourselves. This began our poetry exchange, a backdoor way of sharing how we were doing. I realized, for all its complexity, poetry is a simple way to love. The world needs more of that. 

I think many would agree with me. But in these tumultuous times, how do we get there?

Asking around about what the world needs now, there are an infinite number of opinions - policy change, access to clean water, housing and healthcare, better education, racial justice, a solution to climate change, an end to war, famine and violent conflict.  

What if the answer was something simple and immediate, accessible in the daily life of anyone on the planet. What if we stopped trying to solve the world’s big problems in our quest for love, and nurtured the possibilities for communication, connection and empathy we already have within us. What if it was as simple as…poetry?

When I talk to people about how there is poetry in daily life, it sounds silly. A friend recently described studying poetry in elementary school as an extremely unpleasant lesson in the futility of memorization and being forced at home to read out loud to her grandmother while she was cooking, simultaneously translating Shakespeare from English to Spanish. Yet she’s also captivated by the work of poet David Whyte and in the midst reading Consolations, his contemplative book on the deeper essence of ordinary words. 

Like my friend, our first exposure to poetry often comes at a time in life when we’re not prepared to understand it or use it in any meaningful way. Many people never make their way back to poetry, which is sad, because, Julia Alvarez says, poetry might be the thing that can save us:

In our hyper-digital culture where soundbites and stock stories rule the day, poetry is one remaining connective and metaphorical space where we can discover empathy for each other, and ourselves, and love the world more. 

Poetry has been with us since before we could write, beginning in the form of oral storytelling. It served both social and existential roles, helping people pass knowledge from one generation to the next and creating a sense of group belonging, a sense of where we come from. Through rhythmic and repetitive structures, it was easy to recall and remember. The earliest poems, like Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad from the 8th century BCE, have laid the foundations for understanding how storytelling influences language, memory, and community. 

Poetry connects our individual lives to universal emotions and experiences, fostering empathy and understanding. Langston Hughes Harlem helps us understand how racial oppression leads to an enormous loss of human potential. Written during the Harlem Renaissance, a time of African American artistic and cultural revival in the America of the 1920s and 30s, the poem gives expression to frustrated dreams of freedom, connecting them to the shared human experience of lost hopes. 

Although many people say they can’t connect with poetry, the potential to do so seems to be wired into our psyches. Using functional magnetic resonance imagery, neuroscientists have discovered that, compared to other informational texts, poetry is processed in a different part of the brain.  Also, contemplating poetic imagery and the multiple layers of meanings in poems activates the same areas of the brain that help us to interpret and make meaning of our everyday lives. The moment of insight we can experience when reading a poem isn’t just imaginary, it’s real and can change the course of history.  

And just as much as policy and social movements, poetry has done just that. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is said to have drawn inspiration from Langston Hughes. Nelson Mandela drew strength from poetry during his 27-year imprisonment in South Africa, particularly William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus and the closing lines of the poem, “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” And some say that the poetry of Walt Whitman, in its embrace of democracy, individuality and equality, actively shaped the spirit and optimism of the United States, inspiring Americans to see themselves as a part of a larger whole. 

Poetry might be just the thing that we need to bring more love into the world. As Maria Popova says, 

Poetry “sneaks in through the backdoor of consciousness to reveal us more fully to ourselves; it gives us an instrument for paying attention, which is how we learn to love the world more.” 

After getting my son settled into his new environment,  I left him on his own in Barcelona and returned to California. He surprised me by continuing our poetry exchange. One day I saw a bunch of new texts from him in our chat. I opened the first image and glimpsed:

I celebrate myself and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you  

I immediately recognized the first stanza of Whitman’s Song of Myself, followed by a series of short texts, delightful words that all parents dream of:

hi mom
love this poem
makes me appreciate myself
and realize how lucky i am
now it’s your turn

And the poetry exchange continues….

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Gratitudes

This essay was written as a part of the Write of Passage Program. Heartfelt thanks to

Harrison Moore

,

Rick Lewis

,

Claire Coley

,

Zara Bogaski

and Jose Gutierrez (and others, you know who you are) for your insights and support on this essay. This essay is dedicated to Scott Holland, for bringing me back to Walt Whitman.

Here are links to the ever inspiring I am From Project, the eloquent Maria Popova on poetry, the full text of Langston Hughes’ powerful poem Harlem, and Walt Whitman on Poetry and Democracy.

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