The latest “Happenings in the Humanities” event featured poet Christopher Leibow as its guest speaker. Leibow touched on the value and power of poetry.
Leibow admitted that poets get a bad reputation but argued that we are all born poets. He posed a question to the audience, asking them why we write poetry. Among the answers were these: it is who we are, it is how we engage with the world, and it is how we process our emotions. Leibow agreed, arguing, “We translate our experience into whatever tools we have available to us,” poetry is one of those tools.
Leibow is a Buddhist, which means he is concerned with the concept of impermanence. “In Buddhism,” Leibow stated, “poetry is used to help us understand impermanence. Things come and go, you live, and you die. It is not until we understand something in the heart that it starts to mean something to us.”
Contrary to popular belief, Leibow does not feel getting work published should be the ultimate goal because “You cannot know whether anyone has read your work. I want people to read my words, I want people to hear my words.” To ensure his words are heard, Leibow posts his poems all around Salt Lake City. “I will be sitting there on the corner drinking a coffee and watching people interact with my work. That is a dialogue with my community.”
Leibow emphasized the importance of connecting with one’s local community. A means of doing so is through art. Leibow wants his community to read his work because “A poem is not complete until someone reads it. It can move them to have a response to what I am sharing from one human being to another.” Even if only one person reads his work, that is enough for Leibow to feel he has done his job.
The downfall of humankind, Leibow predicts, will be convenience and distraction. Leibow claimed that he was not jealous of the current generation due to the “multitude of distractions continually competing for attending, the vast majority of them worthless.” He said that in all these distractions, we are looking for community and connection which we can only find through art.
When asked what his most profound muse was, Leibow chose love. He broke down Western love poetry into three categories: the paradise of love, the loss of paradise, and the quest to regain paradise. Due to the trauma of his childhood, most of Leibow’s early poetry was about the loss of and the quest for paradise. Through poetry, he has learned that “Where I came from is important, but it is not who I am.”
Looking back on his early poetry, Leibow reflected on why it may not be very good. A vital aspect of mastering a craft is finding one’s voice. This can be done through imitation, Leibow believes. “Find someone you love and imitate them. That is what artists have done since the beginning of time. In the process, you will find your unique voice.”
Once a poet has found their voice, they can progress from writing individual poems to a series of thematic poems. One advantage to writing thematic poems, said Leibow, “is it allows you to get away from the overcharged emotion of the initial piece you write, which usually isn’t very good.” Leibow read some of his poems from one of his favorite categories of thematic poetry, ekphrasis poetry. He enjoys finding an image that moves him and telling its story.
A roadblock for many poets is comparing their own trauma to others. Once Leibow realized his suffering was valid and should be shared, he began to write about his childhood. He admitted that he has no idea how much of his memoir is factual because memory is fallible. “For me, it does not matter because it was my experience. It is my truth; it is what brought me where I am now.”
There is power in language to bear witness to one’s experiences. Many of Leibow’s poems are not happy, but to him, they are because they allowed him to give a voice to his experiences. “Writing about my childhood is a redemptive act because it helped me to realize that I cannot change the past and it is part of who I am. When your present is saved, your past is saved, and your future is saved.”
