Poets Are the Unacknowledged Legislators of the World

A shout out to Shelley on changing our relationship to words

Image by Tahiti Kulia

Dear Readers,

The mythic currents are really swirling right now. Just a month ago, I wrote about how violent sacrifice is part of the mythic understory of patriarchy, not believing a patriarch would actually willingly choose to abdicate, opening up the possibility of a new cultural story.

The mythic world is making itself heard in ways that people can hear it. A lot of people are beginning to understand there are deeper layers to reality than what’s reported in the media, and I don’t mean conspiracy theories, which I see as the result of a traumatized, overly literal brain, a brain that can’t think in myth because it’s lost its ability to read symbols. (Re-wiring the brain to learn how to read symbols is a major part of The Coracle, my online rites-of-passage mentorship founded on folk tales and the three Hawaiian energy centers. DM me if you’re ready to join now. Website coming soon.)

Can you feel the mythic currents traveling up from oceanic depths, preparing to swell and sweep toward shores all over the planet? It will be up to us to ride these waves if we want to revitalize culture. We could also be drowned by them. We have choices, friends. Remember that, while we still do.

What story do you want to be a part of? A story where the king willingly steps down because someone else is better suited to serve, or a story where he’s sacrificed to make way for another king, who will continue the cycle of violence as power?

I have so many ideas for essays it’s hard to choose where to direct my energy. Honestly, I could post two or three a week, but I don’t want to overwhelm your inbox! While I let things settle to determine what truly wants and needs to be heard, I’m offering here the introduction to my book, Weaving a Basket of Words: How to Write a Poem to Carry Water. It’s 96 pages of simple, craft-based lessons and inspiration for your own poems, and now comes as a PDF download with all paid subscriptions. If you enjoy this introduction to the book, or find sustenance in my work in general, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription by clicking on the button below this paragraph. The PDF will magically appear for you on the other side of the paywall! And remember, If you subscribe at the monthly rate, instead of the yearly, you can cancel at any time.

Weaving a Basket of Words: How to Write a Poem to Carry Water

Introduction

Welcome to “Weaving a Basket of Words,” a book that will inspire and assist aspiring and experienced poets to write poems that I liken to baskets woven so tight they can hold water.

According to Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Even though most of our politicians today are far from being poets, I agree with Shelley. We may think it’s politicians who legislate our lives, but words are what actually govern us, within and without. Poets, with their precise focus on words, have the ability to shape the minds that make the laws. Our task, though usually unacknowledged, is important. We must do our best to rise to it.

“In the beginning was the word,” we hear in the Bible, but how many of us truly believe that? If anything, we believe words fail us. We say they aren’t good enough, that what we want to say is “beyond” words. We even see words as our enemies, used to manipulate us into buying things we don’t really need, or keeping us locked into polarizing beliefs that continue cycles of violence.

These things are true, but words aren’t our enemies. We make them our enemies by the way we use them.

What would happen if we changed our relationship with words? Instead of feeling used by them, or using them, what if we instead asked to serve words, and to be of service through them?

And what if the greatest way to be in service to words, and in service with words, is to write poems? What if poetry was the answer to healing our relationship with words? Or at least an answer? What if a careful devotion to weaving words into poems could shift the balance of the world by making us aware again of our creative powers?

Water, associated with emotion, is key here. A woven poem is one that can hold water, that can convey emotion in such a way that it penetrates a reader’s heart and soul. Many of us are numb. Poems awaken us to our submerged grief. They also reconnect us to joy, reverence, and devotion. There are entire worlds out there, visible and invisible, waiting for our poems to notice and thank them for all they do to sustain human existence.

Contemporary discoveries in science are backing up these assertions. According to quantum physics, we are composed of invisible particles with intelligence that respond to intention. Words are a particularly strong means of conveying intention. Emotions are, too. Poems, as containers and conveyors of emotional truth, have the potential to wield great power. Poems are spells. My goal is to help you write poems that convey your own emotional truths in such a powerful way that the world responds, recognizing you as a collaborator who wants to contribute beauty and truth to a world in dire need of it.

For this to happen, tapping into our unique creative voice is essential. I do see this happening in places like Instagram more and more as people claim their uniqueness and become more vulnerable, but a sense of craft is often lacking. Poetry, in its highest form, and by that, I mean as a vessel of beauty and truth, and agent of revolution, needs to be more than personal expression, no matter how raw and vulnerable. Craft is required because emotion needs a vessel to contain it; otherwise, it spills out and is wasted like water that evaporates on flat, dry ground. As unacknowledged legislators of the world, poets have the opportunity take back the power of language and images from the unethical corporate media and corrupt governments that have used words to manipulate us into believing in the short-sighted vision of consumerism that has resulted in a poverty of the soul. This vision has resulted in physical and cultural genocide of people who have maintained their loyalty to living in balance with Earth. In the past decades, we have lost control of this death impulse completely and the genocide has turned against the perpetrators. Ecocide seems inevitable. We are at war with each other and Earth because we have lost the connection to our souls.

What if we haven’t truly lost our souls, but instead have just dropped the connection, like a cell phone in a tunnel?

Poetry can help us reweave the umbilical braid that connects us to the Great Mother. Poems can reconnect our bodies to our individual souls, and to Earth’s soul. It may even connect us to the stars, though I humbly suggest that we start small like infants learning how to crawl, impelled by wonder to re-inhabit our stunningly beautiful and fertile planet.

It is my hope that you will find inspiration and sustenance here that will result in the creation of beauty that will feed all who inhabit Earth, animate and inanimate, visible and invisible, with the word medicine needed to transmute the current human legacy of extinction, war, and ecocide, into a life-giving culture of acceptance, tolerance, praise, and awe.

I originally designed this book as a 30-day online “challenge,” but over time I’ve found myself resisting the time constraints that come with that name. While I do want to encourage poets to explore their growing edges, right now I’m no longer interested in encouraging the production of a poem a day. Some poems require years to write and must be lured out of the ether with patience and devotion.

Poems are not a product and while some do require pressure in order to be born, I am going to leave that up to you, the poet, and release this “challenge” as a series of 30 lessons that can be done at your own pace. As citizens in a consumer-based society, we already have too many pressures in our lives. Poems should not be one of them.

Poems should be praise-songs or laments for the dead. They should help us call the hummingbird down from the sun, instruct lost flocks of geese on where to alight on land that has been paved over, and heal water that has been poisoned by nuclear fallout. They should help us breathe again in rhythm with the Earth. Long, slow, deep breaths that ease our vision so that when we look up at the sky the stars seem brighter.

So, let’s begin with a deep breath that connects us to our roots. Let’s begin with a relaxed body and mind, and with the intention to open all our senses to our surroundings so that we can become artists, who in Ezra Pound’s words, are “antennae of the world.”

We are here for a reason. Our love for the word is a powerful force for good. The Q’ero shamans of Peru believe that the most powerful people are the ones who pass through the world without notice. Poetry may be an unappreciated art form in today’s visible world, but never doubt its power to alter the spirit world that informs the material.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate every single one of you who takes the time to engage with my words and hope you find sustenance and inspiration here, and more fluidity between the realms of logic and imagination, because that’s my goal. If you’re not already a subscriber, you can subscribe for free or support my work as paid subscriber by entering your name below.