At the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poetry Festival in Stanhope, New Jersey some 30 years ago, poet Sharon Olds responded to a question about her bringing into her poetry people from her life, such as her parents, husband, and children. She used the terms silence for omitting real people and song for referring to them in her work. She concluded, "If I have to choose between silence and song, I will choose song."
Even if we disagree with Olds's choice, we can still appreciate her metaphor, equating the concealment of personal experience as silence and its use as song. We can also extend her statement to the political poetry Ernesto Cardenal, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Pablo Neruda, and to other genres, such as the education treatises of Paolo Freire and the historical criticism of Michel Foucault. Silence evokes closed societies and song open ones. What better way is there to discover how human beings deal with grief, mental illness, and brutal oppression?
While we may stop short when it comes to showcasing our family members or friends in our writing, the writer's imperative is song. That is our existential dilemma. We need to communicate to learn, to evolve as a culture.
