Poetry, Language, and Human Connection

Kelly Cherry’s brief but illuminating volume The Life and Death of Poetry (2013) provides a poetic exploration of language in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Harryette Mullen’s 2002 collection Sleeping with the Dictionary. In Cherry’s case, however, there is less play with individual words and letters (what Mullen’s collection largely turns on) and more attention given to the notions behind language. Where does the idea of language even come from? How and who creates language? What purpose does language serve after it has been created? Cherry artfully wrestles with such questions as these throughout her collection.

Underlying Cherry’s volume is the notion of language’s ultimate power to connect beings to one another. Cherry emphasizes this idea particularly through poetry, casting it simultaneously as a thing that is beautiful and elusive and yet also with the redeeming power of enabling us to understand the human experience.

In her poem “Language,” for example, Cherry writes that language may

ennoble

the soul, electrify the mind,

beautify the Chernobyls

of our devastated hearts, and enable

us to know our human kind.

By comparing our broken hearts to the barren wasteland of Chernobyl, Cherry highlights language’s healing properties, and its ability to make even something decimated feel capable of regrowth. Alongside this comparison, she also points out that language can enable human beings to better know and understand one another, both of which are ideas she applies to poetry elsewhere in the collection.

In “Poetic Justice,” she quotes two lines about mercy from Act IV, Scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice as an epigraph. From this starting point, she writes:

Not from the poet—

from somewhere—where?—

the poem acquires

the quality of mercy,

reviving us

as does the gentle rain

green leaves;

[…]

the poem assures us

we are forgiven,

we are but

human.

Here, poetry is portrayed as merciful and capable of providing human beings with forgiveness that we crave and so often must go without for one reason or another. Because poetry allows us insight into the human condition and our common human experiences, we read it and are reminded that we are only human, and in this way, poetry forgives us our very nature, since, being human, we are all prone to fall short or miss the mark at some point. Poetry is merciful because it shows us how we are all alike rather than how we are different.

In the last poem of her volume—the title poem—Cherry constructs a conceit in which she renders poetry’s life and death analogous to that of Jesus Christ. Again, she emphasizes the idea that poetry is a way for us to connect to one another (perhaps, in this way, serving a similar function to religious beliefs). She begins the poem recalling the opening verse of John in the Gospels:

If word came into the world

Taking the form of man,

Poetry is body,

Flesh and blood we read,

A text that, like a heart,

Can move a heart to love.

And she ends the poem with the lines

The body

Is as helpless as a reed,

But it has a heart

A poem can move to love.

Cherry purports that if we believe in the Gospel idea of the Word-made-flesh, then, when we read poetry, it is as if we are reading another living being that possesses a heart of its own. And because poetry has a heart, it is able to move our own hearts. Our bodies themselves are pliable, easily bent or broken like the reeds they are compared to at the end of the poem. But Cherry once more calls upon the healing, restorative property of poetry as something that can transcend our helpless bodies and touch our hearts instead.

If poetry can indeed move our hearts to love, then is it serving a similar purpose to religion? Perhaps. But more important than this, Kelly Cherry’s The Life and Death of Poetry turns on the idea that language and communication are means of understanding and moving one another, of spreading love and forgiveness and mercy throughout the world, as a means of counteracting the destruction that has taken place.

(To purchase this volume on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Life-Death-Poetry-Poems/dp/0807150428/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8)