What Can Poetry Teach Us About Living Well?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what “a life worth living” means. Not in the suicidal sense—which I feel is worth clarifying, given the fact that I write poetry—but in the philosophical sense of The Good Life.

There’s a large body of philosophy that addresses the question of The Good Life. Socrates believed a good life involved a constant examination of one’s self and ideas, but I have to call bias here, because that’s the only thing Socrates ever did. It’s like a chef saying a good life involves “never eating store-bought hummus.” You’re right, but also, let’s go a little deeper.

Adam Smith, interestingly enough, extends Socrates’ ideas to say that a good life is one in which we cultivate our own virtues outside of the race for wealth, status, and achievement. I do believe he meant this on a personal level, even if the economic theories he grandfathered don’t produce the same results.

Kant, conversely, would argue that a good life is found in good duty. Ever the deontologist, Kant’s belief in “good will” or moral duty is his belief that a sense of duty to humankind cultivates happiness. A kind idea in theory, though what our duty to humankind is is an entirely different debate, so we’re still not very far in this discussion.

Camus offers a much more nihilistic take. We must, according to him, “imagine Sisyphus happy.” Why? Perhaps because the good life is formed from creating meaning out of our habits and rituals. I liked this take when I wanted to perform how intelligent I am for other people. Now I look at this idea and wonder if it’s a counterintuitive form of self-denial.

In between and beyond these philosophers, there are ever more philosophers diagnosing why The Good Life feels so far for so many. I’m particularly keen on Lauren Berlant’s analysis of this in Cruel Optimism. “Cruel optimism,” as she defines it, is when we become attached to something that promises us a reward, but our attachment prevents us from achieving that reward. For example, you might be attached to a substance that offers you psychological relief, but this attachment actually causes you greater psychological pain in the long run. Attachments can be both physical and conceptual: an object, a drug, a person, an idea, an identity, etc.

Berlant’s argument, essentially, is that we live in a set of structures, politics, and cultural phenomena that tether us to cruelly optimistic relationships, suspending us in a site of ongoing precarity or “slow death” in which the good life contains a vague, distant gravity: dreamed towards but never approached.

And I can keep citing, analyzing, and philosophizing, but I am already getting lost in the world of signs and forgetting what they signify. So where can we really think about—and work towards—a life worth living?

My hope is that we can move towards the good life in poetry.

The Poem as Epistemology

If you will grant me one more philosophical term…

Epistemology is the idea of “how do we know what we know?” And really, we exert all sorts of epistemologies in our lives. Science (or, more specifically, the scientific method) is one form of epistemology: it focuses our minds towards understanding the relationships of observable phenomena.

In my opinion, the questions of epistemology get much more interesting at the levels of abstraction. How do believers in God know that God exists? What occurs in the unconscious to tell me whether someone is trustworthy or lying to my face? (What is a “gut feeling?”) A friend told me that an aunt of hers, whom she hadn’t spoken to in 10 years, visited her in a dream the night that this aunt died. Was this a spiritual phenomenon, a visitation of the soul, or an intuition beyond the realm of observable reality?

All of this is to say, we generate meaning and knowledge in more ways than just what’s observable. I used to believe science was the only valid epistemology; I still believe there are many invalid epistemologies, but I also believe poetry (and art in general) are ways of creating knowledge.

A successful poem is often generated from intuitions in language, a close attention to aesthetics, an interrogation of reality and lived experience, and/or an inquiry into the unknown. All of these methods of poetry generation result in the production of knowledge: a successful poem is always a discovery on the part of the poet (even if that discovery is simply “the best way of saying something”).

Let me demonstrate this with two examples—each of which, conveniently, have to do with the questions of life and how we live it.

Example: “Fact” by Rae Armantrout

Retrieved from Poetry.

This poem is quite typical of Armantrout’s oeuvre: sparse, abstract lines; a poem composed of brief sections; a sense of both implicit connection and bewildering vagueness; a hint of irony. How is it that the components of this poem make sense, but nothing quite adheres?

To situate Armantrout, her work fits within a poetics called Language Poetry. Language Poetry’s central ethos is that all of language is an act of mutual construction: the writer conveys meaning, but needs a reader to actually make meaning possible. As a result, poets do not have to create easily digestible, readily transmissible experiences—they can provide a kind of blueprint or sounding board against which the reader constructs their own meaning. If this seems insufferably obtuse, you can blame Postmodernism.

Nonetheless, let’s engage with what this poem is asking us readers to understand.

First, after the poem’s title “Fact,” we get this cinematic line that almost acts as a subtitle: “Operation Phantom Fury.” Let’s come back to it.

Then, we get what is actually a very interesting framework:

The full force
of the will to live
is fixed
on the next
occasion:

That’s a unique perspective! What is an occasion? A party? A promotion? Another meal? Armantrout gives us these examples:

someone
coming with a tray,

someone
calling a number.

These lines make me feel like I’m solving a crossword. Who’s coming with a tray? My butler? My waiter? My boss with a tray of papers? Who is this someone calling? 911? My partner? The IRS?

Maybe what matters is less what these lines invoke, but more how I interpret them. My own reading went towards occasions of work, eating, emergencies, daily life. (I don’t, by the way, have a butler.)

Then, the last section.

Each material
fact
is a pose,

an answer
waiting to be chosen.

“Just so,” it says.

We get a very different idea here. First, we get not just a fact, but a material fact—something observable, objective. “Saturn has rings,” for example, or “Whoopi Goldberg has an EGOT.” These facts are poses, a kind of knowledge-performance: they wait to be chosen as answers, whether it be in a game or trivia, or in a research paper about planets and EGOT winners. “Just so!” the fact says. (Because they assert how “just so” accurate they are?) “Ask again!” ends the poem. (Because the facts enjoy being observed the way they are posed? Or because we enjoy the way we pose them?)

Okay. So we have these three sectioned ideas:

1. Operation Phantom Fury—an abstract title, suggesting at an operation of vague anger or ire that exists within shadows.
2. Our wills to live are always trained entirely on the next “occasion” of life.
3. Material facts are a pose—an aesthetic framing of knowledge through what is and isn’t correct.

These facts each exist under the title “Fact.” But are they all facts? Or are they attempts at fact?

One way of trying to organize these ideas is the following: a “phantom fury” operates behind these two instances of material reality—our lives strung forth event by mundane event, and our narrow frameworks for factual reality based on what can best perform “trueness.” Perhaps an anger underlies our lives being constrained by these facts; perhaps better ways of living are necessary.

Maybe this is completely wrong!

And yet this entire exegesis is itself the point of the poem. Whether my interpretation of this poem is correct or not matters less than how my engagement with the poem constructs meaning. Delightfully, I end up constructing meaning about constructing meaning, which is, again, the kind of insufferably obtuse metacognition that I blame Postmodernism for.

How do you interpret this poem for yourself?

And, after you’re done considering that question, let me offer for you a poem that is a little more tangibly felt.

Example: “My Kingdom for a Murmur of Fanfare” by Kaveh Akbar

Retrieved from Poetry.

What does this poem tell us about living well? Before we can get to wellness, the speaker explores what living “properly” (in accordance with society’s conventions) means: the systems of denial and comfort that spare us from “heat or grief.” The poem opens with images that juxtapose violence with commonplaceness, all of which seem to happen at a distance: the “Fugue” of a bedtime story, the “Goggles” one wears when simply journaling a lover’s absence after he sinks to the bottom of a lake.

“It is comfortable to be alive this way,” the speaker tells us, “especially now.” But hasn’t it always been comfortable? Until it isn’t: you miss a mortgage payment; your punishment is “a falconer’s glove / in your yard, whole hand still inside.” (Did a falcon claw a person’s hand off in your yard?) Or, equally harrowing, you discover your children are “hideous and unlovable.”

This is a poem of quiet horror, then. No shrieks in the closet, not even a bump in the night. Just the uncanniness of life suddenly revolting against you. Which is why this speaker says “it’s okay… to grunt back at the mailman and swallow all / your laundry quarters.” Odd images, to be sure, but only matching the oddness of what life throws at us—and, anyway, entering into strangeness is a part of what makes life meaningful.

“So much of everything is dumb / baffle,” says the speaker, although at this point it feels redundant to say. After all, a falconer’s hand is in your yard and it’s okay to swallow loose change. To be a little less symbolic, life is strange, isn’t it? To be born into consciousness and have to catch up to the many systems and struggles that have formed the world you live in? Be patient, I often tell myself. It is everybody’s first time being alive.

Here’s where I feel the poem creates knowledge, discovers something:

All I want is to finally
take off my cowboy hat and show you my jeweled

horns. If we slow dance I will ask you not to tug
on them but secretly I will want that very much.

What a fantastic set of lines! What does it mean that the speaker is some kind of minotaur? Perhaps nothing—other than the fact that, to step outside of metaphor, we all do feel sometimes that we’re privately quite monstrous. And this moment of discovery tells us a lot about living well: if we are to take the risk of making life meaningful, we must take the risk of uncomfortable self-revelation… of slow dancing nakedly with someone who has the power to hurt and heal us at once.

The title, by the way, encompasses this discovery. My Kingdom (the life lived commonly, with nightcaps and mortgages) for (in exchange for) a Murmur of Fanfare (quiet celebration; what it means for one person to truly see us).

Poetry and The Good Life

Poetry is not just a way of conveying life, but a way of discovering it.

Armantrout’s poem asks us to make our own discoveries based on the ideas she juxtaposes. It’s not an easy poem to grasp, and trying to discern linear meaning feels like navigating a hall of mirrors. Which path is correct, and which is glass? Meanwhile, my own mind stares back at me, sometimes defiantly.

Akbar’s poem, by contrast, is richly symbolic, which also creates space for self-insertion. But, unlike Armantrout, Akbar is interested in showing us what he has discovered: that living well ends (or perhaps begins) with opening ourselves up to risk—and thus, to love.

These are discoveries made from:

• Intuitions in language: Notice Akbar’s musicality and sense of internal rhyme; notice Armantrout’s stark bright line breaks, spacing out the poem’s tension and time.
• A focus on aesthetics: Armantrout’s short lines and sections create a sense of stilted movement; Akbar’s long-lined couplets flow into each other with the sensuous overwhelm of everyday life.
• An interrogation of reality: Armantrout is interested in the locus of the will to live; Akbar wants to know what is lost by “living properly.”
• An inquiry into the unknown: Akbar asks, what would happen if we lived well, not just commonly? Armantrout asks us to consider where our lifeforces and lifefacts intersect, and what happens when they do.

But poetry discovers life even when life is not its subject matter. Robert Frost’s line “and miles to go before I sleep” discovers the pulsing need at the center of our life’s journeys; Dylan Thomas’ line “Rage, rage at the dying of the light” discovers the urgency with which we ask our loved ones to cling to life (even as they die). When Maya Angelou announces to us that “the caged bird / sings of freedom”, she invokes, of course, racism and misogyny and the many structures that made her life difficult—and also life’s persistent optimism despite, despite, despite.

For more on the intersection of poetry and the good life, read Audre Lorde’s essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury” here.

And, for a different epistemological approach to constructing meaning, I recommend the poem “Questionnaire” by Charles Bernstein.

Prompts for Living Well

Here are some prompts for your own poetry. Use them as doorways into new drafts, but also use them as doorways into thinking about your own life. (You can use these prompts for your journal as well, if you have one.)

1. How are you expected to live, and how does it prevent you from living well? Write a poem that explores both sides of this question.
2. Write a poem that only uses imagery (no metaphor, simile, or interpretation) to represent your experience of the present moment.
3. What do you feel most distant from in your own life? Write a poem in which you and the object of your desire never appear on the same line.
4. Write a poem that imagines the good life. What did you see, how do you fit within it, and what can be done to move towards this life?
5. Pay attention to what hurts right now. Write about the experience of this pain. Use poetry as a way of sublimating that pain into relief—or, if not relief, at least a moment of eloquence.