A Place In Which We Can Live
by John Peterson
Reprinted from
The No-Street Poet's Voice
September 1987
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The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven
And as imagination bodies forth
The form of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives, to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. 3
While sitting in an apple orchard near Julian, in the Cuyamaca Mountains east of San Diego, celebrating the recent
Harmonic Convergence (summer 1987) with some friends, I reflected on the significance of community and of the way
voices sounding together open up the dream of each person involved. How movement and color together with imagination
brings a vision from the shadows and how art is both a greater and a lesser vehicle for a people's desires.
Community comes about through artistic acts it seems. Jose Arguelles, poet, artist, and author, who focused the Harmonic
Convergence in his book The Mayan Factor, states that it is art and the creative act that will bring in a new cycle. "Nothing
else has worked thus far in solving the problems of militarism, environmental pollution, and social discontent, so why not give
art, artists, and the creative spirit a try." 1 Community is generated by people creating and recreating their lives through
greater and lesser artistic acts.
In their introduction to Pablo Neruda's Twenty Poems, James Wright and Robert Bly say, in reference to Neruda, "Once a
poet takes a political stand, the wise assure us that he will cease writing good poetry [yet] at least half of his greatest work
one must admit was written after [he became political]." Neruda wrote of his communities needs, dreams, and aspirations.
Garcia Lorca, the great Spanish poet, wrote that it is duende, "a power and not a construct...of blood...in sum, the
earth-force, [that] is sustaining in art. The arrival of the Duende always presupposes a radical change in all forms as they
existed on the old plane. It gives a sense of refreshment unknown until then, together with that quality of the just-opened rose,
of the miraculous which comes and instills an almost religious transport."2
Each poem, each artistic act, if it lives, draws from the blood passion of the earth to bring life and the way we live into being
and it stands or falls with the voice we bring to it. Where is there greater risk. And when is there a greater need for such
artistic acts then now? Poetry is community because:
And we and they will live inside of this.
There is a need for the poet's "diving into the wreak" to chart a path, to give voice to the shadows. There is a need for the
poet to blend with the natural world and be a voice that speaks from the hidden world of nature into the visible culture. Here
and now is a particularly critical time for poets to speak precisely and create community; creating a place in which we can all
live. If not the poet then who fills the voice but the Oliver Norths amongst us?
Living as we do along geo-political, racial, gender, and economic borders gives us the need and the opportunity to speak "the
form of things unknown;"and if the daring is there, so too may be "that quality of the just-opened rose."
1 An interview with Jose Arguelles by Barbara Hand Clow.
2 "The Duende: Theory and Divertissement" by Federico Garcia Lorca, in The Poet's Work, ed. Reginald Gibbons.
3 William Shakespeare, from A Midsummer Night's Dream.