I love poetry for numerous reasons:  how it makes me feel, the way it conjures rich vistas in the mind as though with a paintbrush, the way it provides a container for paradoxical and contradictory ideas, the way it links those ideas together in a way that echoes a puzzle piece falling into place (as though nothing really made sense until those pieces clicked into place), and the way all of these things combine to reflect our lives back to us in an artful, thought-provoking, formative, and radical way. To me, poetry is nothing short of revolutionary for its ability to reveal and illuminate truths, and reconnect us to our innate humanity. Like food, like air, like shelter, I cannot live without it.

There are thousands of poems that evoke those emotions in me, but I couldn’t possibly begin to recount the collective totality of my readings in this blog post. I can, however, share a poem that represents many, if not all, of the things I love about poetry.

Several years ago I was standing next to a woman at a writer’s conference, and started talking to her only to realize part way through our conversation that she was Rae Armantrout. I was stunned at not only our chance meeting, but our chance conversation. Rae Armantrout is one of my favorite poets. And her poem called “Advent” is one of my favorite poems. I promptly gushed about what her poem means to me, and she said “You wouldn’t believe how many people have told me that. It’s so interesting. What is it about that poem?”

I’ve been thinking about her comment ever since. And I realized just as I was sitting down to write this post, that it evokes so many of those things I mentioned in my first paragraph. It contains contradictions, paradoxes, truths, illuminations, fresh insights, rich images, and yes, radical revelations and recastings of the stories we tell. With it’s religious title of “Advent” and its finely-tuned juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated word/ideas, this poem can seem dense and difficult to glean all the implications of its language, despite it’s very short, terse phrasing.

But packed within this tightly controlled and spare language is nothing short of a bomb that exposes and recasts the conceit of human creation. It speaks directly to the stories we tell ourselves, who’s telling those stories, and what the deep underlying truth of those stories really are. The way I read it, it’s nothing short of a manifesto stating where we’ve been and where we’re going as women reinvent the world in which we live. And that is nothing short of revolutionary.

Advent