I Believe, Too

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry
is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said
“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats
for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?

Elizabeth Alexander’s poem “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” touches on a point, or to use another word, criticism, that I have encountered myself time and time again. That is, what is the purpose of poetry? What good does it do for the ordinary man? People will say that poetry is overly sophisticated, or at least attempts to be so, too high-browed, pretentious, and ultimately impractical in today’s world. Don’t need it; don’t care about it. And this does ring true in a way. It seems to me that a whole lot of poetry falls very much in line with such criticism. I myself could not begin to argue against such claims, for how can you explain the value or goal of poetry to someone? But Alexander does, and it is only through the medium of a poem - a self-referential meta-poem - that her words ring genuine.

The speaker in “I Believe” has to be Elizabeth Alexander herself, since there are references to teaching poetry to students, which she did, as well as a quote from Sterling Brown, A black poet and man of letters with whom Alexander most certainly was acquainted. The speaker and Alexander in this text are one.

Alexander compares finding the perfect words to the “digging in the clam flats/ for the shell that snaps”. She uses a great metaphor - “emptying the proverbial pocketbook” – for the transformation of ideas from the mind and committing them to paper. And it is an “emptying” of sorts but an emptying that comes with a relief that resets the process and starts it anew. To me, this first section is more on the craft of writing, the strain of formulating ideas and emotions into words, the search for the perfect constructions in which to transmit an emotion. But where do those ideas come from to begin with?

“Poetry is what you find/ in the dirt in the corner,” she writes. Poetry is about the insignificant, because it is the insignificant, day in day out activities that define our multifaceted lives. The poet searches for the moment when true emotions are on display, those sorts of moments that will never manifest themselves, posing in front of a camera lens. That is why the poet is looking at the “dirt in the corner”; that is why the poet sits on the bus with an open ear and finds “God” in the “details”. They search for those decisive moments that speak volumes about our lives, whether sad, ugly, happy, beautiful, negative or positive. It is a search for the ultimately genuine and revealing.

And the last line puts the icing on the cake: “and are we not of interest to each other?”