No Keys in Poetry’s Doors 0 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

In a post a while back called “Ars Poetica,” Michael Capps quoted from Czeslaw Milosz’s poem, “Ars Poetica?” Mike chose a couple stanzas that express Milosz’s misgivings about his work and his surprise that any of it—indeed, any poetry at all—can be an agent for good in the world. I’ve also long been drawn to this particular poem, and especially to another stanza of it that strikes me as a wonderful articulation of the good that poetry can in fact do (for Milosz is of two minds—of many minds—about his vocation).

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

I love the images here of poetry’s welcome: the open house, the unlocked doors, the flow in and out of invisible guests. Poetry invites each of us into itself, Milosz is suggesting. But more: poetry invites each of us into the other’s house, reminding us that none of us is “just one person.”

Other poets, too, offer similar images of how poetry’s language opens us to one another. Here’s the closing verse of Yannis Ritsos’s “The Meaning of Simplicity,” also in the ars poetica genre (that is, a poem about poetry):

Every word is a doorway
to a meeting, one often cancelled,
and that’s when a word is true:
when it insists on the meeting.

And from Naomi Shihab Nye’s rich poem, “Arabic Coffee,” describing a family ritual of sharing their lives, their disappointments, as they share their father’s bracing coffee:

…When
he carried the tray into the room,
high and balanced in his hands,
it was an offering to all of them,
stay, be seated, follow the talk
wherever it goes.

This is poetry’s invitation to us: “stay, be seated,”—be at home in this house with no keys in the door—and “follow the talk/ wherever it goes.”

Follow the talk. Join the talk. Poetry welcomes us to join its dialogue, and to join one another in the dialogue. Poet Luci Shaw puts all this eloquently in her essay “Beauty and the Creative Impulse” (in The Christian Imagination, edited by Leland Ryken): “Poetry, as well as any of the arts, is my soul crying out to your soul, ‘There’s something here that has leapt into life for me. This is what I’m seeing, hearing, feeling. It’s so uniquely marvelous that I want to share it with you. Can you see it? Can you feel it too?’”