The Shape of Hope
“G R I E F W E A R S a body, and today she stands in mine.”
I wrote this in a poem once, trying to convince myself sadness could be bourn. Many years before that, standing looking out across the forests and drainages of the Cascades in Western Oregon, where he lived, Barry Lopez said to me, “I believe hope may be a particular set of forms things take. Sometimes a landscape takes one of them, and bearing witness to it, hope rises in you again.” Sometimes looking across a tidal flat in late winter light, dwelling in a vivid moment of world, I think I know—I feel; I am—what he means. Just being somewhere sometimes divines hopefulness, from the earth and from your self or some one else’s self. In any event, I think hope is a practice that requires your body to take part in it. It is enacted resistance to despair—a refusal to let the mind or the body slump, for long. It is a persistent opening of the apertures of heart and mind and eye to beauty and to the dignity of carrying on in the face of much that isn’t right.
And hope is always a way with words. It is the poetic way: poetry fashions form from formlessness, language from silence, beauty from various species of terror and despond or bewildered ecstasies. Although the subject-matter of a poem is often the wildness, the imperfection, the enormity of things, the confusions of the heart, the tragedies of existence, good poetry speaks a profound cohesion, a habitable truth-telling, out of the chaos and catastrophe that we live. It finds for “airy nothings” (sadness, grief, anger, longing, hope), as Shakespeare put it, “a local habitation and a name.” For the inchoate it finds a form, and for a reader that form sometimes feels like a precise metaphor for a life—their own—which they can now endure and even love. Poetry is an accompanied solitude. In it, each delight or despair is all such delight or despair; in it, the fences between all Selves are razed.
These thoughts were on my mind when last week (on Thursday 1 September) the ACU Poetry Prize for 2022 was announced. This year’s theme was hope, and seventy-odd poems in the anthology make various lyric assaults on the question of what hope is and where it is found and how it is lived out. Six of my poems made the cut—two about recuperation (“After an Illness” and “A Letter Sent in Midsummer…”), one for my father and the hope his long good life gives me (“At Dusk Along the River”), one for my son Henry (“The Divine Image”) and a moment in which his beatific face, which a lucid dream summoned, put me back inside the love that turns the world, one a soft-hearted rant against the violence ideology does to actual human lives (“Red Guard”), and one (“Cubist Landscape”), in which the fall of light and the flight of a bird and a moment of remembered touch, restore hope to a figure woken if distress . The judges awarded third prize to the last—to “Cubist Landscape,” in my mind the least of the six. But in the light of their endorsement, I see how it enacts—in its tidy architecture, and in the way its diction moves from anguish to joy, and in its subject matter, where first there is (in the speaker and in the vista) only jagged abstraction and where in the end there is one human holding another—its own idea. Which is that the movement from despair to hope is the movement from abstraction to concreteness, from idea to thing. And that, of course, is poetry’s work.
Thank you to the judges Professors Robert Carver and Margot Hillel for finding more in that poem than I had realised had found its way in there. Thank you to the university for its ongoing commitment to the prize and to poetry. If poetry’s work is hope, then we need as much poetry as we can get.
On the night there was another proof of the possibility, of the insistence, of hope was this. Second prize went to Kevin Young for a stunning narrative poem (“The Roofer”) that choreographs a beautiful, gruff and grounded faith—one human’s belief that another will come through a devastating diagnosis. So far the poem has proven true, its faith well-founded. But the particular hope embodied in the awarding of the silver medal to that poem is that I have seen him over years master the crafts of deep care for language that he has practised on his and others lives since long before I met him. Kevin Smith was always becoming a poet, but there were things he barely knew he had to learn, and, through study and mentorship, some of it with me, he’s learned those poetic crafts and learned them so well that he stood one step higher than his teacher on the podium last Thursday at ACU.
Meredith Wattison’s “The Loose Wild Grace of It” won the prize this year. Read it in the anthology, and you’ll see why.
Perhaps the most beautiful form hope takes is the kind that writing poetry sometimes helps you discover inside your despair. That happened for me the night I wrote “Red Guard.” Which ends thus: “And I write this late-night letter to you, my friend, because perhaps all times feel like these, rank with rectitude, to those who burn old flames late into the night, hoping to shape from all they’ve failed fully to understand one true thing, and to pluck from the fire, with fingers already burned, some flowers worth putting in a vase.”
