 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Salute to the Arts Poet Dedication Dedication Angela Jackson We fools, we cut our poems out of air, Night color, wind soprano, and such stuff. And sometimes weightlessness is too much to bear. You mock it, though, and name it Not Enough. "The Egg Boiler" by Gwendolyn Brooks I first fell in love with poetry when I was in first grade and just learning to read. It was the first poem that I met outside of those wonderful, improvisational poems we said with our hand-games, communal sounds, the language of the everyday danced with quick hand movements, language full of the wisdom of the folk. The written down poem that I met in the schoolhouse was a funny poem about an elephant and a telephone. "Once there was an elephant who tried to use the telephant. Oh, no, I mean the elephone who tried to use the telephone..." This play of words made fresh was delight. But that was a child's poem, enough for a child, enough to make a little girl fall in love with language. "The present is a dangerous place to live," wrote South African poet and activist Keoropetse Kgotsitsile. Now is poetry enough, even though the weight of it is wondrous, grave, and sublime? There is an urgency that seethes and flares in us, a desire to be Something More, or give Voice to the Something More that is energy in each of us. There is a vibration, an inner verb, a being that poetry surprises and brings into light. Call it desire; and out of desire comes creation. In poetry, the world of the poem, desire is destined to be fulfilled in the poem and then beyond in the spectrum of human experience. Poetry, begun in the seed of desire, works in us to create from the inside out. Among the Bantu people of Africa NOMMO is the ancient, spiritual power of the word to make material change. Poetry embodies the transformative power of the word itself. Who knows where the impact of the poem is destined to be felt? Who knows the ways in which poetry lights us and energizes us? Each of the poems herein calls us to attention, asks that we give ourselves over to it, even if only to surrender to surprise. These poems embrace us from birth to burial. Herein is a rich gathering of voices to which we come in communion, desiring, co-creating, fulfilling, if only for an extended moment, a part of our own destinies to be Something More, Someone More. When desire, creation, and destiny are one in the ancient power of the word we each may say as Langston Hughes sang, "I am the singer and the song. I am the poet and the poem." There is a momentous wholeness to be found in poetry, if only momentarily. Moments add up. In these singular moments, when we are so much in need, in communion with the poem We Are Enough! May, 2006 |
|
|
|
|
Legal Notices | Copyright | EEO |