Podcast • December 30, 2009

Whose Words These Are (20): Rick Benjamin

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rick Benjamin. (38 minutes, 18 meg mp3) Rick Benjamin says the threshold instruction of most good poems is: slow down, be alert, wake up. The reason to write ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rick Benjamin. (38 minutes, 18 meg mp3)

Rick Benjamin says the threshold instruction of most good poems is: slow down, be alert, wake up. The reason to write poetry is to be of use, he says. The reason to read poetry is that it might change your life.

In our series “whose words these are,” on the practice of poetry today, Rick Benjamin stands out as an activist, a communitarian, a Buddhist, a globalist, a family man who’s always telling his kids: “Remember, talk to strangers.”

He lives by Rumi’s line from 13th Century Persia: “The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.” It’s the idea that gets him up in the morning, and animates his classes at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design on “Poetry in Service to Schools and the Community.”

In an essay on pedagogy, Benjamin writes: “Poets are such good teachers, and their learning catches you in ways that very few other things will. . . . Making poetry is not worth doing if you aren’t trying to bring someone else along with you.”

Q: What’s your favorite poem?

A: Here’s one, but I don’t know if its my favorite poem, because I can’t even pick my favorite meal. I’m just going to say one poem that I know I like a lot. “In Black Water Woods” by Mary Oliver.

Q: What is the talent you most want that you don’t have, yet?

A: I’d like to be a much better glass blower than I am. I dabble in it, but I’m very bad at it. I think I’m too interested in the medium to be good at it – maybe that’s paradoxical. I like paying attention to it so much that when asked to do any of my own work I’m at a loss. I’m kind of a glass-blowing voyeur.

Q: What’s the keynote of your personality as a poet?

A: It would have to be something about circulating love, unabashedly and without embarrassment. The love that we are lucky enough to find in structures like families, in our communities, between countries — to honor it, fully.

Q: Who are your fellow travelers in other mediums?

A: Visual artists like Andy Goldsworthy, who are willing to work with ordinary and organic materials and make something beautiful and impermanent out of them. That’s all I aspire to as a writer, to hope fully with fidelity, make a snapshot of something and know that it will have changed and be gone tomorrow.

Musicians: like poetry, I have a range of music that I really love: some of it is Jazz, people like John Coltrane, and some of it is something more contemporary, like the hiphop music my kids listen to, K’naan.

Q: What is the quality you most prize in a poem?

A: Wisdom. All I ask of a poem is that it has some wisdom, and then my job, I think, is to become a vehicle and vessel and to circulate that wisdom if I have the opportunity and the possibility to do so.

Q: Who is your favorite fiction character of all time?

A: The unnamed narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Q: What is your motto?

A: “I want to love as if my life depends on it, and when the time comes to let it go, I want to let it go and be on to the next thing.”

Podcast • April 11, 2008

Pico Iyer: the "Transcendentalist" Dalai Lama

In Tibet the Dalai Lama was an embodiment of an old culture that, cut off from the world, spoke for an ancient, even lost traditionalism; now, in exile, he is an avatar of the new, ...

In Tibet the Dalai Lama was an embodiment of an old culture that, cut off from the world, spoke for an ancient, even lost traditionalism; now, in exile, he is an avatar of the new, as if having traveled eight centuries in just five decades, he is increasingly, with characteristic directness, leaning in, toward tomorrow.

Pico Iyer, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, page 203.

pico iyerPico Iyer:’open road’ Transcendentalism

The Dalai Lama becomes the best sort of New England Transcendentalist in Pico Iyer’s crystalline meditation on the family friend he’s been watching and interviewing for 40 years — that is, almost all his life. The book opens with an epigraph from Henry David Thoreau (“So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real…), closes with Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit…”) and is brim-full of William James’s wisdom on science, psychology and religion. The title comes from D. H. Lawrence’s paraphrase of Emerson’s child, Walt Whitman: “The great home of the Soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not ‘above.'”

Pico Iyer is himself a man of that open road — born of Hindu parents, both from Bombay; schooled at Oxford; long an American citizen; now based at TIME magazine and in Nara, the ancient capital of Japan. In journalism’s upper reaches these days Pico Iyer’s pieces from Havana, Phnom Penh, Damascus and Delhi set the standard of global curiosity and confidence — of the child-like eye and Old Masterly prose. But there is a home inside this traveler. The joy of our conversation was finding that he has vital roots not far from my own, in those beloved New Englanders. “I would like to call myself a Transcendentalist,” he says. “The higher form of globalism, I’ve always thought, is Emerson. That’s why I chose to write a book about the Dalai Lama: because he’s talking globalism but not at the level of Microsoft, McDonalds or Britney Spears, but at the level of conscience, imagination and the heart.”

Take this conversation with Pico Iyer as a first crack at the Tibet questions that will not go away in this year of the Chinese Olympics. This book, The Open Road, is a brief for the Dalai Lama’s brand of urgent patience (“Speak out, not lash out,” as Pico Iyer puts it) which many Tibetans and others find hard to hear. The hope in the Dalai Lama’s circle seems to be that under constant world pressure the Chinese leadership would deign finally to meet with the exiled holy man. “He doesn’t expect the Chinese leadership to come to its senses overnight,” says Pico Iyer, but neither does he see fruits in militancy. “He knows that to prick their pride is to bring down even greater hardships on Tibet.”

Tell us, Open Sourcerers: who has a better take on responsibility, compassion and possibility with respect to Tibet?