Poet B.H. Fairchild gave a lecture Wednesday night titled “Coming Into Poetry.”
The renowned poet spoke about how he developed his love of poetry and the written word growing up in small town, blue-collar America.
Fairchild emphasized the dual current of his talk, stressing that the autobiographical aspect was an essential part of understanding the philosophy of poetry he was explaining.
His autobiography started with the image he retains of watching his father work in a machine shop, slowly working the lathe with great precision and skill. He used this image of craftsmanlike work to inform how he writes his poetry, constantly returning to his image of “a small thing done well” that he first learned in his father’s shop.
Fairchild first discovered the joy he could derive from the written word on a street corner in Liberal, Kansas, exploring a storefront library. Unfamiliar with the idea of book-borrowing, he was overjoyed when the woman behind the counter informed him that he could take books home. He vividly described the experience of leaving the shop with his nose in Earnest Seaton’s “The Biography of a Grizzly,” his first contact with the exhilarating pull words could have on him.
For Fairchild growing up in a “little town in the heart of the dust bowl,” among the bleak landscape of wheat and maize fields, words were the only way that life could break from the rhythm of life in his town: eat, work, sleep, and “come to a point.”
Fairchild then began to lay out his theory of poetics, explaining the deep connection he feels with Martin Heidegger’s association of poetic language with “the coming into Being-in-the-world, the thing itself, the going-on.” He linked this idea back to his adolescence in Kansas, explaining the habit of him and his friends to describe desirable things as “where it’s at,” without ever explaining what “it” is.
He came to discover, in “redneck Heideggerian fashion that ‘where it’s at’ is in poems.”
At its essence, poetry is a way to get around methodology in communicating experiences. In poetic language experiences can be articulated without diminishing them in the way that strict method almost always will. Even though many people cannot see the use of language that goes beyond conveying strict information, poetical metaphor tells us things that simple language can’t.
“Metaphors are a way of going beyond the strict islands of words and voyaging out into the sea of other experience,” Fairchild said.
