In this essay, Steven Nightingale asks why the ode matters now, and makes the case for poetry as an act of resistance against the corruption of language and the erosion of our inner lives. His two poetry collections with Guernica—A Nectary of Questions and Lustrous Promises—follow the tradition of Pablo Neruda in finding the miraculous in the most common elements of all our lives.
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
“There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language.”
—George Orwell
“He who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
—Voltaire
It would be welcome to say that we live in times of principled comment, patient search for truth, focus on fact, dedication to safety, and respect for privacy. We do not. Instead, we are confronted daily with a cacophony of comment on all fronts: unsolicited messages, voice mails, diatribes, harangues, the manipulation of influencers, the Gatling gun of social media, sordid dismissals of the most vital and indispensable facts, rants that show a flagrant and demonic enjoyment in the suffering of others, and rancid tirades of politics that do not merely lie, they propose to crush truth with violence. It is a politics whose daily practice is the corruption of language, so that words cannot be used for purposes of communication with clarity and grace. Words are, rather, bound and held down so that the guts of meaning may be torn from them.
We have phones and computers and our every move upon them is recorded and tracked, so that we are to the world of data brokers no longer anyone: we are a database and a profile, a portrait of the most invasive crudity. As a result, we will be sought out by forces of commerce and ideology, with the idea that we are a legitimate target, that we can be used for their profit and purposes; and for hostile surveillance by governments, if they decide, as Kafka foretold, that we are guilty of being innocent.
This is a world where direct experience and the independent search for knowledge are scorned. This is a culture that agitates daily to decide for us how we are to live, to think, to feel; to rip from us our humanity; a culture that is not so much an invasion of body-snatchers, as the incessant presence of mind-snatchers.
There are potent antidotes, and one of them is poetry. When it works, we are infused with beauty, whose power, lustrous within us, calls the mind close to life, our bodies close to the earth, and all of us closer to one another. Poetry, like cooking, has a heritage in most cultures in history, and hence a host of forms we may use in our initiative to give language just that luster and healing power. One of those forms is the Ode, notoriously resistant to definition, to the point that some scholars define it, whimsically, as poetry that does not fit easily within any of the established forms of verse.
In Lustrous Promises, our book of Odes, we use the form, following the lead of Pablo Neruda, to look at what is right in front of us. It may be an onion, a cat, a river, a coffee spoon, a flower, a dragonfly, a star. We look and muse, we wonder and conceive, we remember and investigate gently, with care and patience, with slow hopefulness and respectful questing. We take as long as it takes, on our own, with full attention, with faith in life, until we can come into the floodtide of miracle that is present everywhere, in all things, with all grace, in daily life. It is there for us, if we would claim our lives for ourselves, arrive consciously at the sovereignty we are born for, and insist without reserve on having a life we choose, and not a life chosen for us.
It is just an Ode.
It is rebellion, it is resistance, it is poetry we need like air, like light, like soil.
About the Author:
Steven Nightingale is the author of twelve books, including two novels, six books of sonnets, and essays on Granada, the Sierra Nevada, and most recently haiku. A graduate of Stanford University, he divides his time between Nevada, Morocco, and Europe.