The Place of Poetry in My Life – The Voices You Recognize as Your Own

By Suzanne Braun Levine

This is National Poetry Month, an opportunity for all of us to consider the place of poetry in our lives. When I first began to read poetry, I was in those years when my feelings were confused and confusing, and I felt I was under water. I found that poetry validated those feelings, or at least that confusion. The big themes were loss, longing, loneliness, and Love (yes, with a capital L).

I am still confused, of course, but not about feelings. Second Adulthood has brought a new set of emotional needs, and I have looked for poets who speak to those. Mary Oliver, for example, speaks to the strength we can find within ourselves. Her poem “The Journey”- which I quote in Inventing The Rest of Our Lives – is not about loneliness; it is about being alone – and self-sufficient; she evokes the “new voice/ which you slowly recognize as your own.” In a recent interview with Maria Shriver, Oliver points out that in addition to strength and peace, old age has brought her a sense of humor: “I’m funny. I laugh. Life is good.” I love that.

“as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world. “

Grace Paley is the poet of acceptance without bitterness, living with delight, and aging with gratitude. In my new book How We Love Now I use a few lines from a poem in “Begin Again: Collected Poems,” that reminds us that our flesh is also who we are:

“old body old body in which somewhere/
between crooked toe and forgotten head/
the flesh encounters soul/
and whispers you”

And then there is my friend Robin Morgan whose fearless intellect is continuously challenging the wonders and worries of the universe. In Fifty Is the New Fifty I use a few lines from an unpublished poem called “The New Old Woman” to remind us that life is full of ambiguity, that feeling confused, as I did back when I started reading poetry, is part of the human condition:

“The old woman is never wholly who she thinks she is/
because she she’s also always everyone she ever was – /
though never quite the woman others are sure they knew.”

Celebrate National Poetry Month with Maria Shriver, Mary Oliver, Grace Paley and Robin Morgan, visit:
www.mariaschriver.com
www.maryoliver.net
www.graceplaye.com
www.robinmorgan.us