On Living the Questions

Poets are incessantly curious people, driven by both big questions (what is the meaning of life?), small questions (what should I have for dinner?), and craft questions (where should I use a line break?) 

One way to approach the craft of poetry writing is to think of the poem as an answer to a question. Typically, these are the bigger questions about life, religion, politics, family, etc. But don’t discount the smaller stuff—I’ve seen great poems written about the feeling of crawling into bed, or about food on the grocery table. (Often, the small stuff isn’t small at all.) 

As Rainer Maria Rilke says, poets must live the questions they ask. Let’s see what Rilke meant by this in action. 

Close Study: “The Old Catcher Considers the Failing of His Knees” by Devin Kelly

All I did was hide. I made myself so small
I could not be touched. I knew each player
by what they thought was invisible — the twice-tapped
cleat on the batter’s box back line, the little prayer
one whispered: deliver me this, & I will deliver this
for you. I watched their anxiety — how lonely it felt,
how lonely it always is to witness someone
turn their worry into the twitching of a finger,
something muttered, a glance to the sky as if the sky
might forgive each of us our wrongs.
The sky brought the light that hid the ball.
The sky threw shadows I called a curveball through.
When the pain came, I wondered why.
They pulled the chips from my joint & I kept them
in a glass. Look, I know. What isn’t broken
just isn’t broken yet. Jesus, I know. & someone
can spend their whole life hiding away their grief
& then find themselves crying in the dairy aisle of a store
while they hold the mint chip & vanilla,
because the mystery is gone, & with it, hope,
because someone said you don’t have a choice, said
you have to stop, & they were right, & you thought
they were wrong, & you spent your paycheck on tiger balm
& beer, rubbing each into your body until you felt
like liquid poured from a kaleidoscope.
I don’t get it. How what you love can kill you,
even if you spend your whole life loving it.
Even if you love it small. Even if you curl up in its palm.
Somewhere now, someone is whispering a list
of everything they’re scared of but no one
seems to hear them. Somewhere now, the wind
cuts through a promise being made, & breaks it.
There’s that story of the man who walked into the light
&, because of the light, could not see a thing.
Who played that trick on us, that long & lonely trick?

There’s so much to appreciate in this long and gutting persona poem by Devin Kelly, a poet and teacher (who also writes a lovely weekly poetry newsletter). Each metaphor and simile in this piece reaches for something divine, and the poem manages to access feelings universal and true while being grounded in the experiences of an aging baseball catcher.

Let’s break down what’s working in this poem by observing three things:

• The poem’s grounding of abstract concepts in concrete experiences.
• The use of persona to access universal feelings.
• The exploration of unanswerable questions to access something divine/spiritual.

A good poem won’t jump right away into abstract ideas. When a poem introduces itself using concept words like “mystery,” “grief,” or “hope,” it doesn’t often do much for the reader, because everybody experiences those concepts in different ways. Rather, poets should do what this poem does—ground those abstract ideas in concrete experiences. Notice that the first feeling words doesn’t show up until line 6: “anxiety” and “lonely.” By then, the poem has introduced us to who the speaker is: a catcher who makes himself small, who studies each batter and sees their pleading with the sky. Now, those feelings are grounded in embodied experiences, ones we can at the very least empathize with: all eyes on you, anxious and alone, standing at home plate.

In fact, much of the poem uses imagery, similes, and metaphors as bridges between the abstract and concrete. A few examples:

• Anxiety as a twitch of the finger, a glance at the sky.
• The sky as something divine or sentient, casting the light with intention.
• Grief as crying in the dairy aisle.
• Pain relievers and alcohol feeling “like liquid poured from a kaleidoscope.” (What a phenomenal line!)

Through these comparisons and descriptions, the poem uses the persona of the aging catcher as a vehicle for accessing universal feelings. It is much easier to relate to this speaker, now that we know how he experiences grief and anxiety and pain. As a result, the poem delivers its most gutting lines. Of course, I’m talking about this:

I don’t get it. How what you love can kill you,
even if you spend your whole life loving it.
Even if you love it small. Even if you curl up in its palm.

What a gut punch! The poem earns these lines by painting such a vivid description of what it’s like to be an aging catcher, unable to do the thing you love because what you love has broken you. Notice how this excerpt refers back to the poem’s beginning, how the speaker “made [himself] so small / [he] could not be touched.”

Most of the poem is written in the indicative mood—that is, the sentences are statements, not questions or commands or hypotheticals. And yet, there’s an interrogative tension that builds in the poem, as the speaker seems to be shifting his gaze towards the spiritual, wondering what it means to be ruined by the thing he loves. This is what makes the final sentence—the only question in the poem—so much more potent:

There’s that story of the man who walked into the light
&, because of the light, could not see a thing.
Who played that trick on us, that long & lonely trick?

By asking a question that cannot be answered, the poem reaches towards something bigger than us, hands raised towards the metaphysical. Here, then, is a poem desperate to understand the irony of being destroyed by what you cherish most, wanting to believe that there’s a cause, a reason we simply cannot understand, a system we’re a part of that’s unknowable but trustworthy. Is it God’s plan? The design of the universe? Evolution? Who is responsible for this beautiful torment?

For the reader, this question sends us off to do our own metaphysical musing. For the poem itself, the question is the answer, as it’s the reason for the poem’s existence. By grounding the poem in a realistic speaker and climbing towards the realms of metaphor and metaphysics, Kelly’s poem reaches all of us in both specific and universal ways.

For more on persona poetry, check out our article on How to Write a Persona Poem.

Craft Perspective: “Living the Questions” by Lisa C. Krueger

Read it here, in LitHub.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice in Letters to a Young Poet has always stuck with me:

“Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Most poems are born from questions—questions that are spiritual or mundane, political or individual, scientific or literary, or all of the above. Sometimes, the poet knows the question driving their poem right away. What if a poem took the form of a crossword puzzle? What should I say in my last poem to my old lover?

Other times, the poem is an exercise in discovering the question being asked. Devin Kelly’s poem is a great example of this. The premise of the poem was likely “what if I wrote a poem from the perspective of an aging catcher?” But the real question, the question undergirding the impetus to write this poem, was the one at the poem’s end.

This is what it means to live the questions. Kelly might not have been asking himself about the cause of this form of suffering, but the question was there, lived through the experiences of the catcher persona, and revealed to both himself and the poem’s readers through careful attention to the craft of poetry.

This is what it means to live the questions. Poets have the ability to, as Lisa C. Krueger mentions, “dig into our lives with words.” Her form of living the questions looks like this:

“As a poet I spend many hours devoted to what I think of as a universal creative force, a miraculous energy that animates everything and manifests meaning, for me, in the form of words. Reflecting, reading, writing, editing, erasing, questioning, traveling the unknown terrain. Living with the ambiguous text. The confusing silence.”

So, what questions keep you up night? What images can’t you get out of your head? What ideas compel you to the page? Using poetry as a space for exploration and discovery, hopefully you can not just live the questions, but learn to love them, too.