From Barbara Kingsolver’s Small Wonder, “Stealing Apples”
. . . .
Poetry is a different beast. I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day. Like a car wreck, only with more illuminating results. I’ve overheard poems, virtually complete, in elevators or restaurants where I was minding my own business. (A writer’s business.) When a poem does arrive, I gasp as if an apple had fallen into my hand, and give thanks for the luck involved. Poems are everywhere, but easy to miss. I know I might very well stand under that tree all day, whistling, looking off to the side, waiting for a red delicious poem to fall so I could own it forever. But like as not, it wouldn’t. Instead it will fall right while I’m in the middle of changing the baby, or breaking up a rodeo event involving my children and the dog, or wiping my teary eyes while I’m chopping onions and listening to the news; then that apple will land with a thud and roll under the bed with the dust bunnies and lie there forgotten and lost for all time. There are dusty, lost poems all over my house, I assure you. In yours, too, I’d be willing to bet.
... So poets, of necessity, tend to demur. At the most we might confess, “I write poetry sometimes.”
And so we do. Whether anyone pays us or respects us or calls us a poet or not, just about any person alive will feel a tickle behind the left ear when we catch ourselves saying, “It was a little big and pretty ugly, but it’s coming along shortly. . . .” We stop in our tracks when a child pointing to the sunset cries that the day is bleeding and is going to die. Poetry approaches, pauses, then skirts around us like a cat. I sense its presence in my house when I am chopping onions and crying but not really crying while I listen to the lilting radio newsman promise, “Up next: The city’s oldest homeless shelter shut down by neighborhood protest, and, Thousands offer to adopt baby Jasmine abandoned in Disneyland!” There is some secret grief here I need to declare, and my fingers itch for a pencil. But then the advertisement blares that I should expect the unexpected, while my elder child announces that shelter can’t be homeless, and onions make her eyes run away with her nose, and my toddler marches in a circle shouting, “Apple-Dapple! Come-Thumb-Drum!” and poems roll under the furniture, left and right. I’ve lost so many I can’t count them. I do understand that they fall when I’m least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we reverse it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another. It reassures us of what we know and socks us in the gut with what we don’t, it sings us awake, it’s irresistible, it’s congenital.
....when you find yourself laughing and crying both at once, that is the time to write a poem. Maybe that’s the only honest living there is.