#ForTheLoveOfPoetry

by Chelsea Dingman

For the love of poetry, women deserve equal pay. For the love of poetry, we must elect a good and decent human being who will watch out for the welfare of all people equally, both foreign and domestic. For the love of poetry, borders can be secured without endangering the lives of children and families. For the love of poetry, could poets make a life doing something we love and have that be enough?
 
I could go on. Poetry has been solace for me, more so than it has ever been, over the last two and a half years. The reasons for that are both political and personal. I had a hard time getting up in the morning to face the news after the 2016 election. The incidences of gun violence, of hate crimes, of border issue escalation, of simple human indecency, made me despair that we would never live in a better world. I was teaching in Florida, writing, and raising my kids. I was afraid for the future. For my kids. For my students. For their access to good education and health care. For their right to stay alive. I responded by burying myself in poetry, which I already had a lifelong love for. But more than that: it became a need to hear voices in other places and times, to see language as a tool that could carry us into the future, and to face uncertainty as only poetry can.
 
Some things feel like life and death because they are. I used to think that was a sentimental way to view the world, but it has felt especially true the last two years. The people my children were growing up around hold different views, but it was more than that. There was an undercurrent of hate and ignorance. There are Facebook posts about how “all women should be shot” for running for election, or stating their opinions. There were people who told me to go home whenever I stated my opinion because I am from Canada, though I hadn’t lived there for over twenty years. One of my students was deported, mid-semester. Another was living in her car with her mother after Hurricane Irma. Many dropped out. There was a man who told me that my “job” was being a mother, though I was teaching 96 undergraduate and graduate students at the time, as well as helping to run a youth hockey organization. I felt defeated. As a woman. As a mother. As a person with a conscience.
 
Poetry is not a secret club that only brilliant scholars can enter. As Kevin Prufer stated a few years ago in his Pleiades essay, “On Sentimentality and Complexity,” poetry is not an abstract puzzle that cannot be unlocked except by scholars, though that may be the way we are taught poetry at a young age. For me, it is sustenance and grace and intellect. And, yes, complexity, but of the best kind: complex emotions, complex language, in response to the world around us and available to all readers who choose to be challenged in this way. I can’t explain my love for poetry except to say that when I enter a poem, what life I find there sustains me. The use of language as political weapon (Solmaz Sharif), as solace (Mary Oliver), as record (Layli Long Soldier), as power (Sharon Olds), as prayer (Paul Celan), as an expression of love (Li-Young Lee), as historical narrative (Ilya Kaminsky), as a way to respond to world, anchors me to the world at a time when there are few other sources of refuge.
 
When I think about what I would do for the love of poetry, I believe the answer is plain for many of us living as poets: we write, we read, we resound, we share, we go on. There are few people making money on poetry. I can’t take my kids to the dentist or pay my mortgage with poetry. I can’t go on vacation or pay for their sports. But I can’t live without reading and writing as a daily practice. I look at the world differently when I emerge from this space. It’s like meditating, I suppose. I am a better person for having engaged in this life.
 
And so, I go on. Because, for the love of poetry, there are gentle souls in the world. For the love of poetry, the answer to war is more war. For the love of poetry, the world has and will go on after we’re gone. For the love of poetry, I want my children to be strong. I don’t feel strong without this practice. It’s like daily armour. I put it on and I can go out in the world. My mind, alive with possibility.
 
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                Economic Theory

“Canadian pennies cost 1.6 cents to manufacture, and the government expects to
​save $11M a year by eliminating them”-The Economist (2013)
 In a bare room in the mind, midwest
          light filtering through wood slats
in the blinds, the snow falls like a world
          beginning, & I’m tempted to say I begin,
though I have failed to love myself. Out of fear,
          sense slips away like years. A man broke
his fists against the night on my skin, left
          only pennies in lieu of reparations. What value
 
does a thing retain after the people in power
          devalue it? I lived near the well with water
not clean enough to drink. Priceless, I came home
          from foreign lands when working
three jobs didn’t allow me a life. Marriage:
          a country foreign to one’s birth. Always,
a man had all the power when I was young,
          & didn’t have any money for food. There
 
isn’t a day in this life that I haven’t gone
          hungry. But the quiet in my kids’ mouths
means I’ll work twice as hard to feed them
          full. The garden, undersnow. Forever, breath
is an argument against failure. With Botox
          & heady songs. Other rituals, like leaving
a conflict region, a woman invests in
          by beginning. I’m tempted to say I begin. 
Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). She has won prizes such as: The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, The Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, Water-stone Review’s Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, and The South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s Creative Writing Award for Poetry. Her recent work can be found in Redivider, New England Review, and The Southern Review, among others.
For more, visit her website: chelseadingman.com