Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, they have a life to live and they’re not really concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems. Until … their father dies, you go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you any more and all of a sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life and “has anybody felt this bad before, how did they come out of this cloud?”

Or the inverse, something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes, you love them so much you can’t even see straight … and that’s when art’s not a luxury, it’s sustenance

This is actor, Ethan Hawke, talking about creativity on a video that’s been making the rounds on social media. I finally watched it in its entirety, and maybe you should too, especially if you’re more than a little concerned about creativity and creative people or maybe you’re perplexed about why some people you know on Facebook don’t sound like people you know anymore because they are using AI chatbots to generate their status updates. Some of them no longer look like themselves either, opting for AI generated images of their faces rather than than photos of their real faces for profile pictures. But that’s not the point. Not really.

It’s been bothering me, knowing that algorithmic tactics are often behind the content on our Facebook timelines—our friends’ vacation photos, political news, brand mentions, status updates etc  Ah, those Facebook timelines. Mine is just a record of moments I mostly enjoyed or cared about and don’t want to forget. Milestones. It’s not my life in real time. It’s not real, not really. My Facebook persona is better than real-life-me. What’s happening on my Facebook page is not really what’s going on in my life, because if it were, the algorithms would surely bury it below more shareable content that won’t make other people uncomfortable—AI generated dogs dressed up for Halloween or cat videos. 

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I grew up pre-Facebook, pre-Internet, pre-computer in a working class household in Northern Ireland. We eventually had a television, and it had three channels. We had a record player with a non-curated record collection and weekly access to a mobile library where we judged books by their covers. The paper boy delivered magazines and comics every week. I liked what I liked which was different from what my friends liked and that was just fine. There were no algorithms guiding my choices and leading me towards people who also liked what I liked. Northern Ireland was divided enough.

My parents grew up pre-TV and pre-phone. They tuned into the radio when they wanted to hear what was going on near and far. They read newspapers and they talked to their neighbors. I think they got a phone in the 1970s and shared the line with a neighbor. The phone made possible long-distance conversations with relatives in America. It seemed our world expanded and contracted all at the same time. I remember my parents’ resourcefulness—they still have it. Creative people and pragmatic, good with their hands.

My father was the more musical of the two, with an ear for lyrical poetry. My earliest recollection of poetry is his recitation from memory of ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ and ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ by Robert Service or Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”  When I’m back home in the spring when the daffodils appear, I’m transported back to our living room where my father is reciting the opening lines.  Where he learned those poems, I have no idea. He is not an academic; he did not rub shoulders with the Northern Ireland literati. He is a maker of things.

He always whistled or he sang as he worked. He was one of those people who could always pick out a tune on whatever instrument was within reach—”The Black Velvet Band” on a hefty piano accordion with mother of pearl keys comes to mind. He always sang in harmony to whatever was playing on the radio, most likely not realizing he was teaching me to find the harmonies, not the melody, first. When he was just ten years old, recognizing his little brother’s musical talent, daddy made a guitar for him. And, years later, before I was born, he bought me the lovely old violin that has opened doors for me in places I would never have imagined —from East Berlin before the Wall came down all the way to the Mexican village I now call him. I don’t remember my father buying an instrument or a hard-bound book of poetry for himself. He didn’t avail himself of the mobile library. Somehow poetry found him. 

I’ve said before that my dad belongs in a Seamus Heaney poem. If you know him, you know I’m right. He has the “Midas touch” of the thatcher, his craft and carpentry all shaped by and shaping the place that produced him. Both he and my mother grew up in Heaney country, a place where people believed in “miracles and cures and healing wells,” and where everyone knew the “folk healer,” the individual uniquely gifted with “the cure” or “the charm” for whatever ailed them.

In those days, the folk healer meted out charms in plasters and poultices, and potions that swirled in brown bottles. It was to the healer my father once turned when the local doctor told my mother there was nothing he could prescribe for her severe bout with jaundice.  Dissatisfied with this response from a man with formal medical training, my father ventured deep into the Derry countryside to the home of the man with “the charm.” Observant and eager to help even though he could not discern which wild herbs held the curing powers, my father accompanied him into the fields. He watched and then waited as the healer wordlessly concocted the charm – beat the juices from the herbs with a stone, then mixed it with two bottles of Guinness stout and poured it into a C&C lemonade bottle. He sent my father on his way with instructions for my mother to drink every last drop. There was no payment – other than faith in what had been created and the man who created it.

Admittedly, I have always been skeptical of the faith healer but never of the faith at work in the transaction. In times of crisis, when all else fails, where do we turn?

Wherever it is, faith is a part of it. As is human connection. Human creativity.

After suffering a stroke in 2005, Seamus Heaney wrote “Miracle,” as part of his Human Chain collection. Recalling the men who had to carry him up and down stairs immediately following his stroke, Heaney draws on the New Testament story of the paralyzed man lowered through the roof into Christ’s presence:

Just then some men came, carrying a paralyzed man on a bed. They were trying to bring him in and lay him before Jesus; but finding no way to bring him in because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and let him down with his bed through the tiles into the middle of the crowd in front of Jesus. When he saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven you.” – Luke 5:18-20

In a 2009 interview  Heaney, a non-believer, said that “Miracle” was not a spiritual poem, but instead one that marked “being changed a bit by something happening. Every now and again you write a poem that changes gear.” I suppose every now and again we all read one that transforms us.

It was only when he suffered a stroke and had to be carried himself, Heaney realized how important those men were, and he invites us to realize the same, to “be mindful” of those who carried him – the human chain – the ones who knew him all along.  Without the community of people around the sick man, there is no miracle.

Miracle

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in –

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let up

Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

Ethan Hawke’s appreciation for the power of poetry reminds me of what poet, Carol Ann Duffy, once said about it in her response to the devastation of the Haiti earthquake as it unfolded on television.  “We turn to poetry at intense moments in our lives . . . when we lose people, or are bereaved, we look for a piece of music or poem to read at the funeral, or when we fall in love we turn to poetry, or when children are born. And I think that can happen at moments of public grief too, as well as personal. It is so close to prayer, it is the most intense use of language that there is. It is the perfect art form for public or private grief.”

As for Heaney, when asked about the value of poetry in turbulent times, he replied that it is precisely at such moments that people realize they need more to live than economics: “If poetry and the arts do anything,” he said, “they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.”

It works like a charm. We need it more than algorithms.

Make something.

Make something of yourself—for yourself today.

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