Poetry saving America Day 7 #NationalPoetryMonth

Today we're back to a poem about which Tony Hoagland has written in Twenty Poems That Could Save America and spoken about in a Public Television interview. You'll have to draw your own conclusions about how this poem could help save America. Ours lean toward the idea that the current, long-standing, emphasis on pop culture, consumerism, materialism, neoliberalism and several other isms undermine and become the antithesis of respecting solitude and self-discovery. You can find more on that theme in Naomi Klein's No Logo and similar works.

does a solitary swan experience loneliness?

Photo by J. Harrington

POETRY RESPECTS SOLITUDE AND SELF-DISCOVERY

Here’s another scenario. A woman, recently divorced from her husband of twenty-five years (he fell in love with his yoga instructor). Living in the city where they shared a life together, she’s discovering what it’s like to be single at fifty. She has a busy professional life and can handle the daylight hours, but the nights are hard, and she’s decided she’d better stay away from wine in the evening. She believes she might be alone for the rest of her days.

One night on the train home, she remembers a poem from tenth grade called “Bamboo and a Bird.” When she gets back to her apartment, she looks it up on the Internet. It’s by Linda Gregg.

In the subway late at night.
Waiting for the downtown train
at Forty-Second Street.
Walking back and forth
on the platform.
Too tired to give money.
Staring at the magazine covers
in the kiosk. Someone passes me
from behind, wearing an orange vest
and dragging a black hose.
A car stops and the doors open.
All the faces are plain.
It makes me happy to be
among these people
who leave empty seats
between each other.

Reading the poem, the divorcée finds focus. “It reminded me,” she says to her friend the following week, “that there can be dignity in being alone. Remember the woman in the poem? She sees everything so clearly because she’s alone.”

“Yes,” says the friend. “She has this pride about being alone.”

“No, it’s not pride, exactly — she just sees what is in front of her. Because she’s tired. She can see because she’s exhausted and by herself. And even though those other people are maybe unhappy and poor, like her, she isn’t responsible for them. They don’t need to be changed. They can’t change. All of them, they just are what they are.”

“No shame, no pity.”

“It’s all right to be lonely, because everyone else is, too. There’s company in loneliness.” She pauses.

“It’s like existentialism with a hand warmer.”

“What about that guy in the poem, who goes past, pulling the hose? We could never figure that out in class. “

“I don’t know what that hose is about. Does everything have to represent something?”

Hoagland also discusses this poem in an interview on PBS with Jeffrey Brown, Here's that piece:

TONY HOAGLAND: ... I think it’s a wonderfully unpretentious, lucid capturing of a moment that we all can recognize. And there’s just a pleasure in recognition of the world that we live in. And then, also, there’s a feeling tone underneath it and there’s an intelligence which isn’t assertive, but which offers us the chance to hold that moment in our hands and say, ‘Look at this moment, how unusual it is that the poet says, ‘It makes me happy to be among these people who leave empty seats between each other.’ There’s ‘Too tired to give money.’ Those are not look at me moment. It’s not a poem that laments loneliness or tiredness or poverty. It says that there’s a secret pleasure in the individuality, in self-enclosure, and so that’s not a truth that is popularly represented. It’s sort of off the map. It doesn’t connect with any kind of utilitarian economic motive. It’s not something you can test for, but when it’s held up to us and we can examine it, we think, ‘Yes, it’s true. Loneliness is a strange kind of pleasure and I often take pleasure in it.’ 

What do solitude and self-discovery make you think about? As alluded to in Hoagland's comments, they seem to be avoided by many Americans these days. And yet, one of America's great philosophers has this to say about solitude:

“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.” ~Henry David Thoreau

Aldo Leopold notes, in the April section of A Sand County Almanac:

There are degrees and kinds of solitude. … I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood; nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have. 

To the extent Bamboo and a Bird encourages us to not simply hide in a crowd, to the extent we learn solitary pleasures, Linda Gregg's poem could well be one that could help save America. Didn't the United States begin with a Declaration of Independence?

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