Learning by heart: a poetics of research.(Essay)

All the questions I need to ask; the stories I have yet to hear. The heart's two chambers--everything I most desire, everything I most fear. (Keefer 291)

What touched the human heart and intellect a thousand years ago, a decade ago, will touch them again. What is current is ancient. There is nothing new in thought. The charisma of poetry is that it finds fresh resonances in the same old human heart and mind, the same old experiences of men and women, the same world. (Friesen 122)

I want a scholarship that fosters connections, opens spaces for dialogue, heals. I want to rein in power like one might a runaway horse. I need to write from the heart. (Pelias 2)

1

I live in a poetic part of the world, in Steveston, British Columbia, on the shore of the Fraser River, near the Gulf of Georgia, on the rim of the Pacific Ocean. I am daily aware of the privilege of living in a place surrounded by mountains and ocean and sky. In this place I focus on sensual living. In this place I devote a part of each day to poetry, and I learn again and again a lesson I have often learned in the past: poetry invites me to breathe, to attend, to slow down, to embrace the healing and enlivening of body, heart, spirit, and imagination. In the privileged positions of my daily experience, I am attending to autumn light and winter light, moonlight and fog-light, and the play of shadows in alders written by herons and ducks and geese. I am listening to the wind, and noting the ways that eagles, gulls, and crows play in the wind, sometimes hang still and suspended in a boisterous windstorm. And I am attending to language, too.

2

 
   on the edge of morning 
   a heron stands still 
   in the slough near the dyke 
   where I walk daily. 
   gulls hang in the sky. 
   a sea lion rests with the river. 
   an eagle watches from the tallest alder. 
   the whole world lingers. 
 
   I too wait and watch, 
   my image upside down 
   in the smooth river, 
   all the world 
   topsy turvy but 
   still in balance, 
   learning to be still, even 
   in a vertiginous world.