By Jeremiah O’Hagan
I was hunting deer with my dad through the woods of my youth when he asked me if I was writing anything lately. We were sitting for a while on the side of a ridge, overlooking a gully of ferns. Somewhere in the bottom a creek burbled.
“Not really,” I said.
Since before I was an adult, I have been writing. I went to graduate school for it. I was a journalist. I published essays and poems. I became a teacher of writing. Then I mostly quit.
***
“All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din.”
That’s from “Praise Song for the Day,” by Elizabeth Alexander. I teach that poem with my students. I remember watching her perform it at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration. I was teaching then, too, and watched it on the TV in the school library.
***
After eight years of Obama’s oratory skills, we got President Donald Trump’s Twitter fingers. A harsh transition at best. And no inaugural poet.
•••
Did Elizabeth Alexander have any idea that her poem was prophetic? Did she have any idea, a decade later, how thoroughly we would have weaponized language? How pervasive the noise would become? How impossible it would become to get away from it? How sick it would make us?
***
God, how I want to believe in the power of stories. I’ve pounded that pulpit here, in this journal. “Listen,” I said. “Stories matter.”
And God, did I used to believe it. I had a litany of quotations on my braintips.
Three favorites:
“To catch and tell stories; it’s so holy.” — Brian Doyle
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — Joan Didion
“But this too is true: stories can save us.” — Tim O’Brien
***
Between Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem and Trump’s tweets, I left teaching and worked as a journalist. I did hard and soft news, but I lived for features. I took pride in finding the extraordinary hearts of passersby. Ordinary miracles. I was downright prolific. I was proud that I caught and told stories for a living.
***
By the time Trump was elected, I was working part time as a journalist and back to teaching two periods a day at an alternative high school. One of my favorite students of all time, Brady, was outraged. He wrote “An Open Letter to the Youth” on his Tumblr:
“Currently there are huge beautiful protests going on all over the country …,” he wrote. “In its roots, this is the sound of thousands of people being themselves. This is what the youth can provide to its country today. We live in a country where we can be ourselves, and tell anybody about it. That is how this country stays alive: if everyone expresses their voice, then it’s harder for the people who naturally follow others to follow the loud and stupid.
***
In news journalism you learn to be objective. You learn to present a multitude of voices and evidence, and let people decide for themselves. You also learn the power of selecting and juxtaposing those voices and evidence. Ideally, you make it hard for people to follow the loud and stupid.
Of course, journalists can be loud and stupid too.
***
Many years ago, I had a student named Travis. He played guitar. He was a goofy kid, and then he grew into a young man. He got a job at a coffee shop in town. I saw him there one day when I was meeting a friend.
“This guy was my teacher,” Travis told my friend. “You know what he taught me?”
Even I didn’t know.
“He taught me: Say what you mean, and say it once.”
***
I love teaching poetry. I love giving students space for their voices, and some ideas for how to shape them. I love Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Poetry is the best words in their best order.”
And Marvin Bell. I still have these words copied into a notebook from a lecture of his I attended: “On the one hand, it’s poetry, it can save your life. On the other hand, it’s only poetry.”
***
Is it simply more noise?
***
“Everyone’s shouting at each other all the time,” I told my dad in those woods. “I don’t want to be another idiot shouting into the dark.”
***
We all remember Brian Doyle. I was lucky to know him a little. When he died it was like the light dimmed.
In his Epiphanies column for American Scholar, he wrote a short bit titled “The Eloquent Silence of It.” The bit ends, “One of the reasons that reading is so lovely is the silence of the words.”
***
Of course, I teach Dylan Thomas too, when it’s time for villanelles:
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
***
Brady understood that the noise was all around. He understood that more noise might be the only way to fight it. In his open letter he was aligning himself with Dylan Thomas.
***
Rage against the dying of the light.
***
Were you as smitten as I when Amanda Gorman performed her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” for President Joe Biden’s inauguration?
She was poised. She was dressed in yellow as the sun. She was poignant:
“… where can we find light in this never-ending shade?”
All about us is bramble and din. The never-ending shade.
***
The older I get, the less I want to rage. I don’t want to read the news. I don’t want to campaign for grace or goodness or even the power of stories. I want my books and my woods. I want my world condensed. I want quiet. I want to be quiet.
***
My life with this journal begins and ends with death. My first piece published here was about the death of a former student, Mason. Yesterday, as I write this, the body of another former student, Jenzele, was found.
On the wall of my classroom hangs an erasure poem she wrote two years ago, when she was in my English class. Her poem ends like this:
“I know
now what matters.
Wounds. Love.
We remain.”
— from the final page of The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah
***
This year I taught Beowulf with my students. Not the epic poem version (my students think Alexander’s poem is exceedingly long, never mind 3,000-plus lines of archaic English), rather the new retelling by Robert Nye (1968). It’s a prose novella version, and in the intro Nye writes, “This is an interpretation, not a translation. … One retells old myths and legends hoping to be rewarded with the discovery that they are still very much alive and creative. I feel in writing this that I have discovered something about Beowulf.”
***
Elizabeth Alexander ended her inaugural poem this way:
“In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
anything can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,
praise song for walking forward in that light.”
***
At the end of her poem, Amanda Gorman answers her own question about the never-ending shade:
“… we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid,
the new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
***
With all respect to Elizabeth Alexander, Amanda Gorman — like Brady — grew up in the thicket of bramble and din. They grew up in an era, this era, when it is no longer enough to walk forward in the light. We must be the light. We must be aflame.
***
Robert Nye reframes Beowulf. In both the original epic and Nye’s retelling, Beowulf is brave enough to travel across the sea and fight Grendel for the Danes. He puts away his sword and shield because traditional weapons have proven useless against the monster who comes in darkness.
In the epic, Beowulf relies on his legendary strength; but in the retelling, Beowulf relies on the light:
But all at once the light had caught [Grendel]. … Ten strong fingers locked about his hairy wrist. To Grendel, it was as if the sun itself had caught him in its clutch. … Beowulf said: “Light holds you, Grendel. Light has you in its power. … These fingers that you feel are ten great stars. Stars have no fear. I do not fear you, Grendel. I do not fear, therefore I do not fight. I only hold you… . You must die, creature of the night, because the light has got you in a last embrace (40-41).”
***
Trust me when I say I am not writing this essay for you. I am writing it a little bit for Mason, for Jenzele, for all the people and ideas I want to keep alive through retelling. Mostly, I am writing it to remind myself. We can step out of the shade. We can be a flame. Our fingertips can be great stars, and light is a weapon, too. We remain. We have endured the wounds of darkness, and we can wound the dark in return. We can love. Into the dark is exactly the place we need to shout. Even if we speak quietly, and say it once. Amen.
Copyright 2024 O’Hagan