Elizabeth Alexander talks about how poetry — and language more generally — can play a role in bringing us closer to one another. She writes in her poem “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe”:

“Poetry … is the human voice. / And are we not of interest to each other?”

Reflecting on the poem, she asks us, “Are human beings who are in community, do we call to each other? Do we heed each other? Do we want to know each other? … I think it’s a way to move in the world. And if we don’t do that with language that’s very, very, very precise — not prissy, but precise — then are we knowing each other truly?”

There’s a lot at stake in what Alexander asks, and so I’ve found it important to explore the ways this precision might unfold. Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates says he finds it in the choice to simply write “as you hear it” — without hesitation or explanation or apology. “I can speak about the world in a way that is reflective of my life and my community,” Coates says in this week’s On Being. “I don’t have to calibrate my speech. I don’t have to calibrate how I look. I don’t have to calibrate how I walk to make other people feel a certain way. I have that right.”

For you who are in the process of finding your voice, whether as a writer or a human being, you may know that the act of offering yourself permission to show up as you are can be an incredibly lonely experience. Sometimes it requires you to resist the space between your experience and what the world is telling you about yourself (what W.E.B. Du Bois calls “between me and the other world” at the beginning of The Souls of Black Folk and what Coates references in the title of his 2015 book, Between the World and Me).

But I often find comfort in Wendell Berry’s words: “Nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone,” Berry writes. “And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.”

Maybe what Berry calls “learning to be at home” is what’s critical to moving toward deeper truths. And, as Coates says, “That’s a kind of freedom.”

Yours,
Kristin Lin
Editor, The On Being Project