Perhaps we should remind ourselves in this pre-AI age that every poem, any poem, is written by another human being. I did the math with the years, and this is a poem published and likely written about a hundred years ago by a 40-something Midwestern American.

I’m decades past that age, as was Donald Hall when Hall gave us his law that states that most poets, even prize-winning ones, will be forgotten 40 years after they die. This may sound callous, but that process is likely necessary. How many poets can we hold as a culture, as a reader? Dozens? Certainly more. Hundreds? Whatever, there’s a limit. The poet who wrote today’s piece? Who would we give up in the pantheon to let him in?

I came upon the poet who wrote today’s poem, Edwin Ford Piper, by reading a striking poem he wrote of the closing American wilderness that I’ve already presented earlier this year. I know little about him as a person.*  I almost worry to find out more, since human beings are full of all kinds of faults, deleterious opinions, vanities, and misapprehension. Did he write this poem in this time of the year, in the Spring? Who can say. Writers are full of memories, and imagination that can redress any cold or baren place, but it feels like he did. The poem’s trope of Spring’s reincarnation of driving/seeking life paired with the Christian holiday of Easter is far from unique — but the poem’s not, in feeling, much of a Sunday-dress observance — it’s luxuriously pantheistic. “Whispering Often”  was written in a past era we still call Modernism, published in a journal that put forward many of the great English Language Modernist poets, Chicago’s Poetry Magazine, and it was included in Poetry’s  founder’s anthology shortly afterward that had Modern American Poetry  imprinted on its end-boards — but I can’t call it an example of Modernism.

If you can un-embarrass yourself, you could sing this Spring poem too.

.

It’s not end-rhymed. It does sing on the page, despite having a meter that I can’t easily chart out. There’s a familiar iambic rise to many of the phrases, but I don’t think I can call it blank verse, a form that Piper used elsewhere. Oh, but does this rite of Spring want to sing! The title says whispering, so maybe the poet is abashed at the voice that is called forth. Not a lot of today’s poetry sings like this. Instead, we’re more often interested in a poem showing us a particular apprehension the poet has uncovered, an apprehension we are to recognize and share. We are want to pause and recognize the matter of typical 21^st century poems, like a friend speaking with us. A wise friend perhaps, a little better with language than we normally are — but still, we wouldn’t want them to break out into a song over shared teacups or beer glasses. How gauche that’d be!

And so, I think of this poem now, as Spring is rebeginning here in my Midwest, as the Abrahamic religions are celebrating holidays of freedom, rebirth, and revelation — but more so as the northern half of earth is celebrating something that Abraham could have seen in a place outside Ur. In this case, a man in his 40s, a Midwestern American like myself, stopped and wrote this down.

What an odd act! If he paused to think about it, he would know that by all odds this poem will be soon forgotten. Yes, Piper was a professor of literature, but he was an adult, someone who knows the comings and goings, the correct way to behave, the agreed worth of this and that. Yet the poem will appear as something as outrageous as an unbidden public song, one with a crush of erotic desire for life. Religion can shape and seek to make that solemn — and perhaps such a transformation teaches wisdom, brings thoughtful ethics to our roots and melting eddies — but that Spring is older than wisdom.

It’s enough to make a grown man break out into song after all.

So I did. Earlier this month I hurriedly sang a bunch of pieces I had written that I feared wouldn’t have time to shape and improve into full arrangements in an interrupted life. Long-time listeners will know my voice isn’t going to be polite, though maybe it should be. You can hear that quick, short, performance with the graphical audio player below. No player? You don’t have to rush past, you can use this alternative highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*It’s not certain, but there’s a fair chance that later this year I will make another trip to pay respects to one of my poetic heroes, Carl Sandburg, and on the way tarry awhile to see if I can learn more about Edwin Ford Piper.