Passion for the Climb
Not My Last Apologia for Poetry

By Jasmine Bailey ’05


Jasmine Bailey ’05 began writing poetry when she was 10 years old; she recalls consulting the poetry textbooks lurking alongside literature on the bookshelves in her home (her father is a professor of English as a second language). After graduating from Colgate, she spent a year in Argentina on a Fulbright Fellowship, and completed her MFA at the University of Virginia, where she has since been an instructor of writing. Her chapbook Sleep and What Precedes It was published by Longleaf Press in 2009, and her poetry has appeared in several magazines, including 32 Poems, Poet Lore, Rhino, and the Portland Review. This fall, she returned to Colgate as an Olive B. O’Connor Creative Writing Fellow in the English department, where she is teaching Intro to Creative Writing and working on a collection of poems called Alexandria. (photo by Andrew Daddio)

Richard Hugo said in his poem “Langaig” that “Fishing preceded song. We know this by instinct.” This is an idea hard for me to accept. Certainly, hunger is the sharpest and most primordial pain, and, more than other things, dictates what we do. It is true, too, that writing was not possible before agriculture, and even then, to practice writing required leisure and education that few could afford. But we know that people sang long before they wrote their songs down, and that the urge to make art is ancient; instinct tells me that poetry could not have been far on the heels of any other human impulse. I cannot believe that when hunger first drew men to the river, as each waited with the line resting on the pad of his finger, someone didn’t notice the sun on the trees and its resemblance to a woman’s hair.
    Writing is so much like fishing: the quiet, the solitude, the waiting, the endlessness of a task that cannot be completed. The killing and consuming of what is most loved and valued for the sake of survival, the many days without a catch. Mainly, the deep silence from which the song rises.
    If poetry is the written expression of the unsayable, then poets are alchemists, turning one thing into something else that it formerly was not. Like Melquiades in One Hundred Years of Solitude, we lose our sight in the laboratory of the impossible task, abandon our tribe, and are forced to keep working after death. And for all this, we create something not easily comprehended and that can’t be carried. Most people sense this futility about poetry, so writers are forced out of their rooms to stand in apology of the art, as if the desire to make gold from lead, and the importance of trying, were not self-evident.
    I wonder whether God, or the poem, is older. We owe the preservation of many early writings to the monks who spent their lives copying them, even throwing books into bogs when the Vikings arrived torch-studded. Many books had nothing to do with God, or with the right god, but even in invasion, the monks did not abandon them.
    Men and women make what they need, whether it is supper, shelter, a poem, or a savior. Most people, most days, need bread more than they need poetry. But when, as inevitably happens to each person, the world becomes uninhabitable, the poem, like the mother you believed you had outgrown, is a trellis you can climb to a balcony just high enough to delay the approach of the spreading chaos. Poems last longer than our beloved mothers.
    I admit that I love poems because they can be perfect, as nothing except art can be. “Langaig” is perfect, even though everything it contains is troubling and heartbreaking, and Hugo himself, like anyone, suffered and in life fell short of the ease and exactness he struck in his best poems. “To relax, to slide with, ride the forces of whatever/ sweeps us along, jokes well-timed, phrasing under control— / that was my ideal. I didn’t come close in real life.”
    Writers usually give ample justification, but we should still not speak too ill of them. If a human being can take the raw beauty and terror of the world and use his imagination to fashion it into something truer than anything in the world — more lovely, more scalding, more elastic, more final — and balance its elements in a way that the world is never balanced, then praise the human imagination and the spirit that tries for it, because we need what they give. Outside of poetry, we would not find the perfect lemon or lake or Ford Galaxie, some hot young stuff draped all over it. And the Beloved, for all that he did or didn’t love us, always dies. The poem answers the inevitable dream the world causes in the heart.
    The poet is a fisherman and a monk without the one’s skill or the other’s virtue. Still, praise him, riding his glorious squid through labyrinths of kelp.




Read more essays from our Passion for the Climb series, or see how you can submit your own essay, at
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