Poetry and Diplomacy: When the Heart Wants to Cry

Abstract

Poetry and DiplomacyWhen the Heart Wants to Cry Indran Amirthanayagam (bio) As one gets older, memory looks for somewhere to sit or perhaps just a wall to lean against. I felt the cold breeze of age when I attended the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference in Philadelphia in March 2022. I was wandering around the bookfair when I ran into Indran Amirthanayagam. This is what poets do when they are not writing—they wander. Wasn't it Langston Hughes who wrote the autobiographical book I Wonder as I Wander many years ago? Indran and I met in 1993 at a bookstore in Washington, DC. The man is a poetry man, not the one Phoebe Snow sang about but a Pablo Neruda type of guy. A poet and a diplomat. While at the AWP conference we had a chance to sit at a small table and talk about the things poets talk about when they are not talking about love. Indran is always writing and staying on the move. His most recent book is Ten Thousand Steps against the Tyrant. I often joke about how he looks a little like Salman Rushdie. Indran is from Sri Lanka, a place that was once known as Ceylon, a place I always associate with the writer Arthur C. Clarke. A month after our close encounter at AWP, Indran sent me an essay. After reading it I decided it would be something to nicely frame and hang in my ABR column. His words force us to hit the pause button. What happens to the poetic imagination during times of conflict and war? How does one handle despair and harvest sadness into hope? Too many of us are living lives in motion, crossing borders and boundaries. This earth is too small for poets to ignore its air and potential. There is a moment in Indran's essay when he seems to morph into Ernesto Cardenal, encouraging one to remember the poem "Ecology." Yes, we must think of many things as we struggle beneath the stars. We must care not only for humanity but for all of nature. This is the quiet diplomacy that shouts for us to believe in. This is the call we hear pleading to us to protect our global village. Poets must continue to write and find the strength to love. We need peace. We need more poems. I pray that our words discover their wings and turn into butterflies; such beauty is needed in this world. —E. Ethelbert Miller When you are hurting, when you feel sad, turn to the lines that have shaped you, that you know from memory, that have been inscribed in your heart and mind. The struggle of Man against Power is the struggle of Memory against Forgetting. [End Page 49] Man is in love and loves what vanishes. We are on Earth a little space to learn to bear the beams of love. I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree. I am here to speak about diplomacy and poetry, my twin loves, my twin engagements. I was born into these professions: my father, Guy, a civil servant and then a diplomat, always a poet; my great-uncle Tambimuttu, a poet and editor, founder of the only poetry magazine that published every month during the darkest days of World War II, in London, under the Blitz: Poetry London. I am here in Geneva to talk of my own attempts at making order and grace, of uniting the different, complex strands of personality and experience, of home and exile. I was born a Tamil, a minority in an island known as Ceylon. Ceylon no longer exists, renamed Sri Lanka when I was a boy of twelve in 1972. So much has happened since then. So much is happening today as we witness the disappearance of so many species, of islands covered with water. What is one more disappearance, namely that of Ceylon? For this individual mind it is fundamental, a guiding principle. So from early in my life, two years before I started to write poems, I was already on some deeply felt but unconscious level aware of my fundamental raison...