Wings to Soar High by Amir Or
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In Wings, Amir Or’s thirteenth book of poetry, he is principally concerned with the accidents of birth. Here is a secular humanist born by existential chance into Tel Aviv in 1956 and now asking, What does it mean to exist in time? How are we born into and through language(s)? How might place influence identity? And what are the limits of a single life?
Thus he writes in the third poem in the book, which is tellingly titled “Already Here:”
Morning, and the world
is already here;
we’ve arrived together
to the starting line,
children of a moment,
our name is I.
But what is the meaning of this a priori world, and how exactly do we emerge from it? More pointedly, who is this always already plural I?
Wings pivots upon such questions, engaging them not only as existential crises for contemplation, but also as sociopolitical truths lived actively each day. For, as Or writes in the poem “Tomorrow,” “we have no I except the ones we are,” emphasizing the urgency of our need to recognize the plurality of the self.
This is the core of Or’s vision of existence, which is in turn the driving force of the book: Wings poetically unfurls a cosmology espousing that we are an intricate constellation of individuated plural subjects living in common in relation to time. Consequently, the poems in Wings are at their most powerful and enduring when the plural I questions time itself.
For example, in “Tomorrow,” the plural I activates the past in the present, thereby disassembling conventional, fixed conceptions of temporality. This leads us to think more deeply about being, with poetic tropes configuring for us ways to contemplate presence in relation to mortality. As Or explains, “our hearts knew the truth of the dead: / all we will be already was.”
The intent is neither to explore a macabre poetics of loss, nor to elicit a melancholic ethos of belatedness. To the contrary, Wings is a book of hope and love; Or is engaged in the crucial work of imagining more pacifistic, inclusive, and compassionate futures. And he pursues that possibility by poetically destabilizing divisions between temporalities, challenging us to rethink the past as active in the present, thereby transforming the grounds for our “tomorrows.”
Or begins such work aesthetically, orchestrating sensory experience as the medium for connecting readers to this shared project of creating futures. As he explains, “our eyes [must] remain open / to see what the tomorrow we strive for will bring,” and this leads us to understand how, paradoxically, “[w]e hunger for sights we’re yet to see.” Like this Wings engages us corporeally in the interconnected, collective activity of reconsidering time through collaborative imagination.
In a sense, then, the genius of Wings lies in its ability to compel us to reconceive human existence by unhinging time. Like Hamlet, Or reflects on how “time is out of joint,” with the past loosed into the present and thereby impacting the future. But unlike Hamlet’s dark, phantasmagoric fatalism, Or’s cosmovision is threaded with the brilliant light of willed hope, which we feel.
Through this affective poetics, Or artfully exposes and disorders time within and between us, exciting us to imagine with him new ways of understanding shared experience. Perhaps mot importantly, he undertakes this so as to push us to realize more harmonious ways of coinhabiting the planet.
This is why Or interrogates the cosmic accident of coming into being, and it begins immediately in Wings, with the first major cycle of poems in the book, titled “Morning Poems.” This cluster of poems expresses awe at the mystery of the emergence of life from nothingness. For example, in the poem “Dawn,” Or writes metaphorically of the emergence of his consciousness from oblivion as the moment when his “window-sky awoke.” And he continues such rumination on emergence throughout the cycle.
He also extends his theorizations of presence beyond the human to construct a more comprehensive phenomenology of being. Like Heidegger, Or reworks our very conception of being in relation to time, seeing the ways in which “[f]rom the night / leaves stretch forth / to emerge into blustery dawn” as an portal to insights into processes of emergence.
All the while, too, his rigorous reckoning of being reveals fractal logics of patterned multiplicity in each individuated presence. For example, in the poem “Face” he interlaces these beings to demonstrate their layered interrelation, including the symbiotic correspondence between the plural I and the natural world.
Silently a cool breeze strokes my skin
the light of dawn lies gently on the leaves
a world, slowly, is opening its limbs
everywhere my face reveals itself again.
This is the incarnation of Or’s cosmology in his face, which concomitantly embodies, connects him to, and individuates him from the plurality of being that comprises the extant universe. That is, his face is the locus of the material “everywhere,” and it represents both the agency of the poet in revelation, and the power of the sensory stimuli of the world to make the poet.
Furthermore, the poetry emphasizes how these intricate creation stories are processed through language. Consciousness emerges in its articulation, and what it elucidates is the “everywhere” of being. In this manner Wings works like the Book of Genesis, naming worlds into existence. But Wings goes further. Unlike Genesis, it interrogates the anthropocentricity of human inquiries into the great mysteries of existence.
More precisely, throughout Wings Or examines both the possibilities and the limits of anthropocentric conceptions of life. Where the emergence of presence from nothingness is a beauteous mystery to behold, it also exceeds human apprehension. Our minds are constrained by our mortal, animal specificities.
This is the importance of Or’s intimation in a poem like “Gray,” for example, that “[a] hand holds a pen, the eye what can be seen. / Slowly the day opens into being.” Likewise in “Don’t Ask,” he explains that “[t]he shape of things is the shape of the eye.” Lived truth is expressed through the body, but the body is also the fundamental constraint on our understanding, which is abbreviated by our limited sensory, linguistic, and imaginative capacities.
In other words Wings inspires us to grapple with how our humanity both helps and hinders us in any considerations of being; “only the heart blurs the boundary / between what is and is not.” And such an insight could in fact be understood as the very organizing principle of Wings. It certainly drives the first major cycle of the book and links it to the second one, titled “The Journey (A Diary).”
In “The Journey (A Diary)” Or extends his intimate ontological reflections in “Morning Poems” by mobilizing the plural I, with travel becoming his preferred metaphor for thinking of disjointed time in relation to world-making. Consequently, “The Journey” is a more social cycle than its antecedent. It continues to emphasize agency born of creative activity as in “Morning Poems,” but now the poet’s action is in the service of striving always for harmonious modes of interconnecting individuated human experience.
This leads Or to suggest that if we desire a more kind, inclusive, and egalitarian world, then it is up to us—the readers, the citizens, the plural-I’s comprising the many overlapping communities constituting our world—to enact them. And we read this in the poem “Chased,” for example, through which Or encourages us to discover the influence of the past in the present via a realization of how the plural-I’s of then inundate and course through the plural-I’s of now.
Moreover, the poem illustrates how our ability to harness those transhistorical layers of plurality is the fundamental skill for beginning to create alternative futures: “[i]n your flesh you’ve learned from them how to control / yourself, loved ones, enemies – everyone.” Through a recognition of the potential to open the individuated flesh of the self to the simultaneous multiplicity of publics past and present, we each can gain insight into how we interrelate, and this in turn will help us to conceive new modes of interrelationship for more harmonious futures.
Or explains as much in the poem “Friday.” There he addresses the reader directly in the second-person singular, writing that if you can come to recognize how “[y]ou’re walking, seemingly alone, / though over your shoulder / a stubborn crowd follows,” then you might begin to be able to imagine life beyond the simple binaries of past–present and self–other, which have wrought so much violence across human history.
Against such violence, Or introduces the third major cycle in the book, “Prayer Poems,” which asks us again to look deeply inward. But unlike the delighted ontological awe of “Morning Poems,” and the delicate social concerns of “The Journey,” these poems pivot upon deeply private introspection, with Or struggling in earnest first-person poems with spiritual despair over existence.
In a particularly plangent moment of agonistic abandon, Or beseeches the ever absent godhead to manifest itself finally: “Before you, the God who invents himself, / my prayer implores you: Be!”
Yet Or already has shown us that existence is plurality; being is being plural, whether the plural I of the self or the plural temporalities constituting the present. As a result Or’s contemplation of presence throughout this cycle invokes various figurations of not only revelation, but also sacrifice.
Or even goes so far in the “Prayer Poems” as to offer up his very body to the “Artist of Existence” as prima materia for a new world-to-come. To evoke this in the poem “4,” for example, he reverts to a literary metaphor from the “Morning Poems,” but it is transfigured with a sacrificial abandon, implying a willingness to be instrumentalized and used up in selfless service to others: “Take me in your hand like a beloved pen.”
It bears mention, too, that even at his most despairing, Or permeates this cycle and the book with the imminence of love. It is the poet’s calling, the reader’s calling, and every godhead’s calling to exude it, and accordingly Or charges us through his poetry to love against absence, loss, insecurity, selfishness, and betrayal.
In short, we are charged with loving against the violence of time itself. This is why Or cries out in the third poem in “Prayer Poems” on behalf of mortal lives:
Help me, O Great Whole,
to forget past injuries;
let me once again trust
my love for the world.
Such are the stakes of poetry for the plural I. Our salvation lies not in seeking to be loved, says Or, but in learning to love, and thus returning to flight from any aggrieving misfortune.
From the intense ontological intimacy and fervor of the “Prayer Poems,” Or opens the book outward again with the next major cycle, “The Pantheon.” It comprises a public examination of our relation to that “Great Whole,” asking how we might conceive it, even as its totality always already escapes our human, and therefore inadequate and limited, capacity to apprehend it.
With that focus, Or interrogates a transcultural and transhistorical selection of godheads, hailing from Ancient Greece, Judea, and Christendom. In the poem “Hermes,” for example, Or has the messenger god and conductor of souls wonder anxiously of existence, “what’s the point in all this? When / will I finally deliver myself to me?” Likewise, through “Aphrodite,” another persona poem in the cycle, Or interrogates corporeality by having her ask ruefully, “I’ve harnessed souls to plow flesh; / and for what?”
Or adds himself, his plural I, to this chorus of deep uncertainty about the meaning of ontotheological myth-making, and asks of his own cherished work as scribe, “how shall I harness words to spirit?” And this makes “The Pantheon” an especially evocative for its ability to expose the dangers of essentialist interpretations of the self and any conceptions of divinity positing fixed and absolute meanings in frozen time.
From those theosophical allegories, Or plunges into a much more quotidian register with the next major cycle, “Mr. Man.” Therein he pillories the quotidian muck of bureaucratic life by illuminating the social and civic tribulations of a bumbling male protagonist, the eponymous Mr. Man. We follow him through his days as vacuous functionary, with poem after poem about him exposing the foibles of diurnal toil in a hypercapitalist world.
However seemingly unadventurous the subject, these are bleak and biting poems about personal confliction, which Mr. Man exemplifies in his daily struggle to endure the violent pressure to conform to simplistic social expectations such that: “[h]e would [simultaneously] burn down the office if he could; / [and] his lips wish everyone good day.”
In a later poem, Mr. Man even concedes to being “alive only in name.” Worse, in yet another, we learn that each night his existential despair is so profound as to drive him to excessive drinking, such that “[a]fter a glass or ten, he no longer [even] remembered / his name, and what he would get up for tomorrow.” Mr. Man is paralyzed by the futility of his life in relation to the splendorous potential of being.
It might seem inevitable, then, that the final major cycle of poems in Wings is titled “Poems of Reckoning.” From many purchases in the preceding cycles, Or has inculpated the self, the plural I, in structures of inherited violence and all of the historicity that they entail. For only in this way, through this exacting reckoning, can we begin to rebuild the self, meaning to rebuild our interconnected communities, and consequently our shared future.
Where Or looks backward in the opening poem of the cycle and confides that “[m]y eyes are too weak from crying to see,” he moves from an initial, personal sorrow to an invitation to each of us to join him and struggle to see. Here he is entreating us to recognize and re-envision our shared responsibility to strive through love to combat suffering, selfishness, and cruelty.
This is encapsulated in his critique of presentism in the cycle when he writes:
don’t say: it’s not our hand that caused this outrage,
not our mouths that comprised the shouting crowd;
not our hand that brandished the whip and steel –
we only watched in silence from the upper galleries.
For silence is slime that seals the soul –
if your hearts won’t cry out, the stones will:
when a house collapses, it falls on all of us –
a cry in every mouth, and blood on every soul.
What tomorrow have you left, parent to child?
In other words, Or urges us to act; the plural I is action; the self must speak up and out plurivocally and transhistorically, and just as crucially, we must listen as actively as possible to one another. Hence the interrogative, for example, however seemingly rhetorical.
This poetic attention to the demanding work of trying to hear and contemplate difference in all of its complexity is in fact a key promise of Wings. It offers itself as a forum for such exacting exchange in the service of self-scrutiny, which is always already public and plural. Wings celebrates the courage, tenacity, and creativity necessary to such labor. For without it, we cannot endeavor to transform our lived conditions and experiences.
In other words, without a meticulous reckoning of the importance of disjointed time and its impact on the very possibilities of being, we are condemned to suffering and hopelessness. This is why Or asks in the poem “As We Remember:”
…where shall we find peace and serenity?
How to raise up our lowered heads?
Where shall we fire anew our empty hearts
with the light of freedom and equality?
Where shall we find again compassion and dreams
to establish an abode for our souls?
In response to such central questions to human existence, Or repairs to his aforementioned ethos of love, as in the penultimate poem in the book, “Seven Lines to Sunrise:”
…despite it all – life; despite it all – love.
We’ll indeed see the heart’s gate
open to a world of hope.
In its paths we’ll stride again, wondering at its beauty,
our spirits clear and peaceful:
we’ll indeed see the rising morning.
Here, besides the uplifting vision of a world of love coursing interpersonal paths, we cannot help but recognize yet another invocation of the plural I. Love will lead us to converge on and emerge from the rising morning together; it will lead us outward from our individuated, if interconnected, hearts to the open world of hope, where we will discover ways to be and to be in common.
Our shared future depends on our ability to embrace the paradoxical plurality of the self. It leads us inward to greater understanding, and by turning outward to engage it in others, we can together open spaces for love to bind us into new networks of hope and possibility.
This is why Or reminds us in the poem “To Your Soul,” for example, that “[a]t the door to your world the hive gathers,” and why “the entire nation of the I [is] assembled at your gate.”
He is inviting us to dare to pass through that gate and take flight with the hive towards new modes of being. This is the urgency and exhortation of Wings, which implores each of us to “[b]e everything! Burn with every desire, / every love, liberty, and adventure!”
For if able to “spread your wings, dear one, and look / around you at this beloved world,” then you’ll discover yourself epiphanically crying out from new and insightful multi-perspectival trajectories that “[e]verything I meet here is welcome.”
And this in turn will lead us to more compassionate, pacifistic, and egalitarian futures. Such is the occasion and mode of our connection through Wings, wherein Or’s very motivation is finally to share the love that binds us in being, and all of the attendant hope that comes with it:
I can’t be silent;
don’t beg it stop
even if a storm
from my strings erupts;
it’s because of you, friends,
because of my love,
and because of yours.
Thus he writes in the third poem in the book, which is tellingly titled “Already Here:”
Morning, and the world
is already here;
we’ve arrived together
to the starting line,
children of a moment,
our name is I.
But what is the meaning of this a priori world, and how exactly do we emerge from it? More pointedly, who is this always already plural I?
Wings pivots upon such questions, engaging them not only as existential crises for contemplation, but also as sociopolitical truths lived actively each day. For, as Or writes in the poem “Tomorrow,” “we have no I except the ones we are,” emphasizing the urgency of our need to recognize the plurality of the self.
This is the core of Or’s vision of existence, which is in turn the driving force of the book: Wings poetically unfurls a cosmology espousing that we are an intricate constellation of individuated plural subjects living in common in relation to time. Consequently, the poems in Wings are at their most powerful and enduring when the plural I questions time itself.
For example, in “Tomorrow,” the plural I activates the past in the present, thereby disassembling conventional, fixed conceptions of temporality. This leads us to think more deeply about being, with poetic tropes configuring for us ways to contemplate presence in relation to mortality. As Or explains, “our hearts knew the truth of the dead: / all we will be already was.”
The intent is neither to explore a macabre poetics of loss, nor to elicit a melancholic ethos of belatedness. To the contrary, Wings is a book of hope and love; Or is engaged in the crucial work of imagining more pacifistic, inclusive, and compassionate futures. And he pursues that possibility by poetically destabilizing divisions between temporalities, challenging us to rethink the past as active in the present, thereby transforming the grounds for our “tomorrows.”
Or begins such work aesthetically, orchestrating sensory experience as the medium for connecting readers to this shared project of creating futures. As he explains, “our eyes [must] remain open / to see what the tomorrow we strive for will bring,” and this leads us to understand how, paradoxically, “[w]e hunger for sights we’re yet to see.” Like this Wings engages us corporeally in the interconnected, collective activity of reconsidering time through collaborative imagination.
In a sense, then, the genius of Wings lies in its ability to compel us to reconceive human existence by unhinging time. Like Hamlet, Or reflects on how “time is out of joint,” with the past loosed into the present and thereby impacting the future. But unlike Hamlet’s dark, phantasmagoric fatalism, Or’s cosmovision is threaded with the brilliant light of willed hope, which we feel.
Through this affective poetics, Or artfully exposes and disorders time within and between us, exciting us to imagine with him new ways of understanding shared experience. Perhaps mot importantly, he undertakes this so as to push us to realize more harmonious ways of coinhabiting the planet.
This is why Or interrogates the cosmic accident of coming into being, and it begins immediately in Wings, with the first major cycle of poems in the book, titled “Morning Poems.” This cluster of poems expresses awe at the mystery of the emergence of life from nothingness. For example, in the poem “Dawn,” Or writes metaphorically of the emergence of his consciousness from oblivion as the moment when his “window-sky awoke.” And he continues such rumination on emergence throughout the cycle.
He also extends his theorizations of presence beyond the human to construct a more comprehensive phenomenology of being. Like Heidegger, Or reworks our very conception of being in relation to time, seeing the ways in which “[f]rom the night / leaves stretch forth / to emerge into blustery dawn” as an portal to insights into processes of emergence.
All the while, too, his rigorous reckoning of being reveals fractal logics of patterned multiplicity in each individuated presence. For example, in the poem “Face” he interlaces these beings to demonstrate their layered interrelation, including the symbiotic correspondence between the plural I and the natural world.
Silently a cool breeze strokes my skin
the light of dawn lies gently on the leaves
a world, slowly, is opening its limbs
everywhere my face reveals itself again.
This is the incarnation of Or’s cosmology in his face, which concomitantly embodies, connects him to, and individuates him from the plurality of being that comprises the extant universe. That is, his face is the locus of the material “everywhere,” and it represents both the agency of the poet in revelation, and the power of the sensory stimuli of the world to make the poet.
Furthermore, the poetry emphasizes how these intricate creation stories are processed through language. Consciousness emerges in its articulation, and what it elucidates is the “everywhere” of being. In this manner Wings works like the Book of Genesis, naming worlds into existence. But Wings goes further. Unlike Genesis, it interrogates the anthropocentricity of human inquiries into the great mysteries of existence.
More precisely, throughout Wings Or examines both the possibilities and the limits of anthropocentric conceptions of life. Where the emergence of presence from nothingness is a beauteous mystery to behold, it also exceeds human apprehension. Our minds are constrained by our mortal, animal specificities.
This is the importance of Or’s intimation in a poem like “Gray,” for example, that “[a] hand holds a pen, the eye what can be seen. / Slowly the day opens into being.” Likewise in “Don’t Ask,” he explains that “[t]he shape of things is the shape of the eye.” Lived truth is expressed through the body, but the body is also the fundamental constraint on our understanding, which is abbreviated by our limited sensory, linguistic, and imaginative capacities.
In other words Wings inspires us to grapple with how our humanity both helps and hinders us in any considerations of being; “only the heart blurs the boundary / between what is and is not.” And such an insight could in fact be understood as the very organizing principle of Wings. It certainly drives the first major cycle of the book and links it to the second one, titled “The Journey (A Diary).”
In “The Journey (A Diary)” Or extends his intimate ontological reflections in “Morning Poems” by mobilizing the plural I, with travel becoming his preferred metaphor for thinking of disjointed time in relation to world-making. Consequently, “The Journey” is a more social cycle than its antecedent. It continues to emphasize agency born of creative activity as in “Morning Poems,” but now the poet’s action is in the service of striving always for harmonious modes of interconnecting individuated human experience.
This leads Or to suggest that if we desire a more kind, inclusive, and egalitarian world, then it is up to us—the readers, the citizens, the plural-I’s comprising the many overlapping communities constituting our world—to enact them. And we read this in the poem “Chased,” for example, through which Or encourages us to discover the influence of the past in the present via a realization of how the plural-I’s of then inundate and course through the plural-I’s of now.
Moreover, the poem illustrates how our ability to harness those transhistorical layers of plurality is the fundamental skill for beginning to create alternative futures: “[i]n your flesh you’ve learned from them how to control / yourself, loved ones, enemies – everyone.” Through a recognition of the potential to open the individuated flesh of the self to the simultaneous multiplicity of publics past and present, we each can gain insight into how we interrelate, and this in turn will help us to conceive new modes of interrelationship for more harmonious futures.
Or explains as much in the poem “Friday.” There he addresses the reader directly in the second-person singular, writing that if you can come to recognize how “[y]ou’re walking, seemingly alone, / though over your shoulder / a stubborn crowd follows,” then you might begin to be able to imagine life beyond the simple binaries of past–present and self–other, which have wrought so much violence across human history.
Against such violence, Or introduces the third major cycle in the book, “Prayer Poems,” which asks us again to look deeply inward. But unlike the delighted ontological awe of “Morning Poems,” and the delicate social concerns of “The Journey,” these poems pivot upon deeply private introspection, with Or struggling in earnest first-person poems with spiritual despair over existence.
In a particularly plangent moment of agonistic abandon, Or beseeches the ever absent godhead to manifest itself finally: “Before you, the God who invents himself, / my prayer implores you: Be!”
Yet Or already has shown us that existence is plurality; being is being plural, whether the plural I of the self or the plural temporalities constituting the present. As a result Or’s contemplation of presence throughout this cycle invokes various figurations of not only revelation, but also sacrifice.
Or even goes so far in the “Prayer Poems” as to offer up his very body to the “Artist of Existence” as prima materia for a new world-to-come. To evoke this in the poem “4,” for example, he reverts to a literary metaphor from the “Morning Poems,” but it is transfigured with a sacrificial abandon, implying a willingness to be instrumentalized and used up in selfless service to others: “Take me in your hand like a beloved pen.”
It bears mention, too, that even at his most despairing, Or permeates this cycle and the book with the imminence of love. It is the poet’s calling, the reader’s calling, and every godhead’s calling to exude it, and accordingly Or charges us through his poetry to love against absence, loss, insecurity, selfishness, and betrayal.
In short, we are charged with loving against the violence of time itself. This is why Or cries out in the third poem in “Prayer Poems” on behalf of mortal lives:
Help me, O Great Whole,
to forget past injuries;
let me once again trust
my love for the world.
Such are the stakes of poetry for the plural I. Our salvation lies not in seeking to be loved, says Or, but in learning to love, and thus returning to flight from any aggrieving misfortune.
From the intense ontological intimacy and fervor of the “Prayer Poems,” Or opens the book outward again with the next major cycle, “The Pantheon.” It comprises a public examination of our relation to that “Great Whole,” asking how we might conceive it, even as its totality always already escapes our human, and therefore inadequate and limited, capacity to apprehend it.
With that focus, Or interrogates a transcultural and transhistorical selection of godheads, hailing from Ancient Greece, Judea, and Christendom. In the poem “Hermes,” for example, Or has the messenger god and conductor of souls wonder anxiously of existence, “what’s the point in all this? When / will I finally deliver myself to me?” Likewise, through “Aphrodite,” another persona poem in the cycle, Or interrogates corporeality by having her ask ruefully, “I’ve harnessed souls to plow flesh; / and for what?”
Or adds himself, his plural I, to this chorus of deep uncertainty about the meaning of ontotheological myth-making, and asks of his own cherished work as scribe, “how shall I harness words to spirit?” And this makes “The Pantheon” an especially evocative for its ability to expose the dangers of essentialist interpretations of the self and any conceptions of divinity positing fixed and absolute meanings in frozen time.
From those theosophical allegories, Or plunges into a much more quotidian register with the next major cycle, “Mr. Man.” Therein he pillories the quotidian muck of bureaucratic life by illuminating the social and civic tribulations of a bumbling male protagonist, the eponymous Mr. Man. We follow him through his days as vacuous functionary, with poem after poem about him exposing the foibles of diurnal toil in a hypercapitalist world.
However seemingly unadventurous the subject, these are bleak and biting poems about personal confliction, which Mr. Man exemplifies in his daily struggle to endure the violent pressure to conform to simplistic social expectations such that: “[h]e would [simultaneously] burn down the office if he could; / [and] his lips wish everyone good day.”
In a later poem, Mr. Man even concedes to being “alive only in name.” Worse, in yet another, we learn that each night his existential despair is so profound as to drive him to excessive drinking, such that “[a]fter a glass or ten, he no longer [even] remembered / his name, and what he would get up for tomorrow.” Mr. Man is paralyzed by the futility of his life in relation to the splendorous potential of being.
It might seem inevitable, then, that the final major cycle of poems in Wings is titled “Poems of Reckoning.” From many purchases in the preceding cycles, Or has inculpated the self, the plural I, in structures of inherited violence and all of the historicity that they entail. For only in this way, through this exacting reckoning, can we begin to rebuild the self, meaning to rebuild our interconnected communities, and consequently our shared future.
Where Or looks backward in the opening poem of the cycle and confides that “[m]y eyes are too weak from crying to see,” he moves from an initial, personal sorrow to an invitation to each of us to join him and struggle to see. Here he is entreating us to recognize and re-envision our shared responsibility to strive through love to combat suffering, selfishness, and cruelty.
This is encapsulated in his critique of presentism in the cycle when he writes:
don’t say: it’s not our hand that caused this outrage,
not our mouths that comprised the shouting crowd;
not our hand that brandished the whip and steel –
we only watched in silence from the upper galleries.
For silence is slime that seals the soul –
if your hearts won’t cry out, the stones will:
when a house collapses, it falls on all of us –
a cry in every mouth, and blood on every soul.
What tomorrow have you left, parent to child?
In other words, Or urges us to act; the plural I is action; the self must speak up and out plurivocally and transhistorically, and just as crucially, we must listen as actively as possible to one another. Hence the interrogative, for example, however seemingly rhetorical.
This poetic attention to the demanding work of trying to hear and contemplate difference in all of its complexity is in fact a key promise of Wings. It offers itself as a forum for such exacting exchange in the service of self-scrutiny, which is always already public and plural. Wings celebrates the courage, tenacity, and creativity necessary to such labor. For without it, we cannot endeavor to transform our lived conditions and experiences.
In other words, without a meticulous reckoning of the importance of disjointed time and its impact on the very possibilities of being, we are condemned to suffering and hopelessness. This is why Or asks in the poem “As We Remember:”
…where shall we find peace and serenity?
How to raise up our lowered heads?
Where shall we fire anew our empty hearts
with the light of freedom and equality?
Where shall we find again compassion and dreams
to establish an abode for our souls?
In response to such central questions to human existence, Or repairs to his aforementioned ethos of love, as in the penultimate poem in the book, “Seven Lines to Sunrise:”
…despite it all – life; despite it all – love.
We’ll indeed see the heart’s gate
open to a world of hope.
In its paths we’ll stride again, wondering at its beauty,
our spirits clear and peaceful:
we’ll indeed see the rising morning.
Here, besides the uplifting vision of a world of love coursing interpersonal paths, we cannot help but recognize yet another invocation of the plural I. Love will lead us to converge on and emerge from the rising morning together; it will lead us outward from our individuated, if interconnected, hearts to the open world of hope, where we will discover ways to be and to be in common.
Our shared future depends on our ability to embrace the paradoxical plurality of the self. It leads us inward to greater understanding, and by turning outward to engage it in others, we can together open spaces for love to bind us into new networks of hope and possibility.
This is why Or reminds us in the poem “To Your Soul,” for example, that “[a]t the door to your world the hive gathers,” and why “the entire nation of the I [is] assembled at your gate.”
He is inviting us to dare to pass through that gate and take flight with the hive towards new modes of being. This is the urgency and exhortation of Wings, which implores each of us to “[b]e everything! Burn with every desire, / every love, liberty, and adventure!”
For if able to “spread your wings, dear one, and look / around you at this beloved world,” then you’ll discover yourself epiphanically crying out from new and insightful multi-perspectival trajectories that “[e]verything I meet here is welcome.”
And this in turn will lead us to more compassionate, pacifistic, and egalitarian futures. Such is the occasion and mode of our connection through Wings, wherein Or’s very motivation is finally to share the love that binds us in being, and all of the attendant hope that comes with it:
I can’t be silent;
don’t beg it stop
even if a storm
from my strings erupts;
it’s because of you, friends,
because of my love,
and because of yours.
The Reviewer:
Seth Michelson is a poet, translator, and professor of poetry. He has received many awards for his writing, including winning the poetry category of the International Book Awards, an NEA, an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, and a poetry prize from Split This Rock. His recent books of poetry include Swimming Through Fire and Eyes Like Broken Windows. Among his nine books of poetry in translation are The Ghetto (Tamara Kamenszain, Argentina), The Red Song (Melisa Machado, Uruguay), Poems from the Disaster (Zulema Moret, Argentina/Spain) and Scripted in the Streams (Rati Saxena, India.) He also edited and translated the anthology Dreaming America: Voices of Undocumented Youth in Maximum-Security Prison. He teaches the poetry of the Americas at Washington and Lee University.
