Resist! Revolt! Renew!

Por: Milla Van der Have

How poetry can helps us be in the world differently

A while ago I found myself in Chile, waiting for a reading to begin. While the poets and their ‘entourage’ hung around, drinking coffee, swapping books, a young man who worked with the theatre came to talk with me. He wanted to know what brought me there, what I thought of the country and many other things. But he waited until our second conversation, when I returned from a brief round of the theatre grounds, to spring his true question on me. “Why poetry?” he asked, with sincere interest.

To be honest, I do not like that question. Perhaps it rattles me that poetry is expected to produce a ‘why’ whereas so many more harmful activities of humankind are embraced without a second thought. But mostly I think I’m annoyed by this question, because I don’t really have an answer for it ⏤ at least not an answer that has me as a willing agent in it.

Why poetry? “Poetry arrived in search of me,” Pablo Neruda writes in his aptly titled “Poetry” and so it was for me. It came for me when I was around 16 years old. It found me, it had me and that was that. Why poetry? There is no answer. It just happened. So, trying to wriggle my way out of this somewhat disturbing question, I chose the easy (and I thought, smart) way out. “Why not poetry?” I replied, content with myself. But this young man was sharper than I had given him credit for. He called nonsense. “That’s the same as saying why not undertaking,” he pointed out. Seeing the truth in what he said, I smiled and finally gave him my real answer, not the answer perhaps to the original why (which may have been as mundane as: I was in a physics class and I was bored) but the answer to why I love poetry and why I keep coming back to it. “Because poetry is an act of resistance,” I said.

Poetry is an act of resistance. That’s an even bigger answer to a question that’s quite big to begin with. I myself am no stranger to asking poets uncomfortable questions. Several times I have asked a guest poet at my poetry event: “how has poetry changed your world?” I deliberately put it this way, your world. That alone seems reach enough. Because no one ever answers that poetry started a revolution or stopped a war or put someone in jail or got people to recycle more, at least not in my secluded corner of the world. [1] And also close by, to the east where things were (and perhaps, are) vastly different, I don’t think the powerful threat of a rope and a branch in Czeslaw Milosz’ “You Who Wronged” stopped a despot in the tracks of his misdeeds. No, even closer to home, how many times did I feel Rilke"s admonishing “Du mußt dein Leben ändern” burn in my mind, to no avail? For here I am, evolutioning but hardly revolutioning, going about my business. So if poetry only works on the inside and hardly ever on the outside (as far as I know, for it may be different in different parts of the world) how can poetry be an act of anything, let alone resistance?

    First of all, exactly because of this perceived ‘uselessness’. I have been struck by the love and awe a lot of Latin-Americans show poets and poetry. Because here in the Netherlands, as soon as people realise it doesn’t earn you any money, poetry is discarded as futile and boring. Writing poetry is resisting the mandate that everything we do should have a direct material value and that alone is rebellion in our late-capitalistic world of woe.

    But there is more. The way I explained it to the young man in Chile was like this: we are constantly told to look at the world a certain way, in fact that the world is a certain way. That it’s either black or white, night or day, good guys (us) vs. bad guys (them). That there is right or wrong, that everything used to be better in the past or will be better in the future. That the world is big and impossible to change and that it’s no use to try as an individual because there will always be people and countries who won’t change and then whatever you did will be, there we have that word again, useless.

    To me, one of the most vicious lies we are told (again, in this part of the world), is that things are what they are. That there is only one way of looking at things. But poetry teaches us a different way of looking, a ‘slant’  perspective, to take the thought of Emily Dickinson. Poetry is a way of looking deeper, of loving harder, a way of seeing things not as they ought to be, but as they could be, as they would be.

    “The straight line is godless and immoral,” the artist Hundertwasser said and in my opinion poetry opens up a thousand slant lines of view, each delving towards the heart of the matter in a different manner, showing us a kaleidoscope of truths, that changes with the perspective you take but never loses its veracity. So while dictators might not be stopped by poetry, this must be why they fear it. For it has the ability to uncover harder, more difficult truths and thus opening our eyes to the reality of our universe, which is perhaps as simple as that quote from Democritus I once encountered on the label of my tea-bag: Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

    There are no truths other than those we make: that must be a frightening thought to one claiming to be the sole source of everything. Poetry unveils many sources of truths, revealing to us Bohr’s idea of a profound truth, which is a truth that is true as well as its opposite. Poetry excels in showing us those truths, the uncomfortable, unfathomed ones. But while doing so, because it show us those opposite truths, it also deepens the mystery. Poetry resists what we are so fond of doing in our rational way of being: summarise, explain, break down into little parts, as if by completely taking something apart and examining all its tiny components individually, we can gain a better understanding of how the whole works. Poetry is the parts and the whole and living this contradiction in a world where we all need to be compartmentalised so as to be managed is an act of resistance for sure.

    Finally, there’s a third way poetry is resistance and this is the most bittersweet. For our world is fading rapidly. Birdsong has become monotone in many places, no longer that varied orchestra of which poets used to sing. Our oceans heat up, filled with plastic. Glaciers dwindle, rivers flood and the richness of nature has become dreaded monoculture. Perhaps I too have been brainwashed too much with the mantra ‘the world is as it is’, for I no longer believe this change can be stopped. But we can, in the words of Dylan Thomas, “not go gentle in that good night.” Poetry is how we can “rage against the dying of the light” if only by preserving in memory the greatness of what once was. Or by cataloguing the truths, the essences, the whole and the parts of all we are losing. Or by being grateful for whatever we still can love and witness and bear testimony of that, with loving kindness. Of all the arts, poetry for me still the best way to be with the mystery of the world, even as it breaks apart.

And then again, I am reminded of Rilke, who wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet an answer to the young man’s complaint of having lost God. Rilke urged him to not look at God as something you could lose, but rather as something that was coming and growing, each day, within us:

    Why don’t you think of him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity,              the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you                 from projecting his birth into the ages that are coming into existence, and living your life as a painful            and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don’t you see how everything that happens is                   again and again a beginning, and couldn’t it be His beginning, since, in itself, starting is always so                   beautiful? If he is the most perfect one, must not what is less perfect precede him, so that he can                   choose himself out of fullness and superabundance? Must he not be the last one, so that he can                    include everything in himself, and what meaning would we have if he whom we are longing for has               already existed? [2]

    Make of God what you will; for me it’s the rapture and beauty of our natural world and Rilke encourages me to not lose heart but rather to let heart work within me and seep out into the world - as poetry.  We can’t change the world, perhaps, but we can look at it differently and by looking at it differently we can change the world. That resistance-meets-renewal is what poetry offers.

[1] you will always see, now that I have started asking the question directly, how can poetry change the world, poets tell me: poetry has changed their life.
[2] Quoted from: https://castig.org/letters-to-a-young-poet-by-rainer-marie-rilke/

Milla Van der Have is a Gemini and a self-proclaiDutch poet who writes in English, she is the author of three chapbooks, her latest being Ox and Mandarin | strange walkers (2024, Dancing Girl Press/RIL publishers), available in English and Spanish. Her work explores identity, myth and perception. She lives in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Every second Friday of the month, she organizes the unique international poetry event, Poetry Lit!