Introduction to A Walk in the Woods

Here is the draft introduction to a new poetry collection that I am thinking to publish in autumn. It’s a collection of poems that I wrote in response to another art form. Just testing it out here to see how it feels.

Used to be that I would feel embarrassed that I wrote poems about other poems or works by other artists like songs, films, paintings. I judged this as a life spent more watching or reading than ‘living’. This has been a reoccurring self-accusation for most of my life.

However, another common declaration that I have made equally about my life serves as a great counter-argument. That writing poems about other poems or other people’s work lets me in on conversations that I could never have with live people. That I get to know people far better through their art than in any other kind of exchange. I can ‘walk’ with writers who may have lived a century before me, in a different society or geography that might make it difficult for that artist to ever meet or see me.

Take Henry David Thoreau as an example. I have joined him on Walden Pond for his two-year excursion into the woods several times in my life. Every time he is still a young man clearly trying to discover what his beliefs are and how to stake an intellectual claim on them – for it seemed at that time one needed to do so for them to have merit. I also recognize that the societal lens that I see him through may prejudice my understanding of him.

But so is the way with all relationships with people. We can’t know each other fully. One minute Thoreau is an arrogant academic trying to judge everybody for what we don’t understand. Another, he is David letting us join him in breadmaking and in a Western reading of the Bhagavad Gita.

We do the best that we can with each other – hopefully with respect and humanity.
And with people we befriend, admire, learn
from the privilege to ‘walk’ with them through their
point of view
in a thoughtful manner
less inclined to be reactionary
a far better way to learn about them
and the times that they lived in
that has always had more truth for me than
non-fiction versions of the truth
they are another form of living that daily living does not afford me

Not saying that I will go the complete opposite and now forsake the entirety of the ‘real’ world to cavort exclusively with people of the page or frame but just recognize the privilege of building living exchanges with thoughts and talents from different times and worlds.

I think a simple way of describing this poetry collection is that it describes how I can sit with a stranger in a space far more intimate than I would with a stranger in real life. I discovered the gift it is when somebody shares something of themselves in an artform. Some gifts I like more than others. All gifts respected with a greater empathy the more I put my own out there.

© lyw