Dear David St. John 2021

Dear Michelle,

What a terrific, generous letter about “In the High Country.” I loved what you brought to the poem in terms of what you’ve learned about the history of the Renaissance in your Humanities course, as often the poems we love best seem to resonate with what we love also in other of the arts that we might care about—art, music and dance—as well as those moments in history and culture that feel meaningful to us, even across time. Sometimes the poems we are drawn to bring us excitement and challenges; sometimes, they are able to bring us peace in a confusing world.

Your intuition about the relationship of this poem to song is exactly right as well. For me, I believe poems persuade by their music and not by their “argument.” Poems are not essays (though they can behave that way). For me, the music of a poem, its movement, its rhythm and shifts, and its imagistic language are what enter me and what give me the experience that allows me to engage with and to be moved by the poet’s reflections or observations. You might not be surprised to learn that I teach a poetry class for my undergraduate students called, “Poetry and Song” and one for my graduate students called, “Writer and Composer”— and that one includes young poets as well as musicians and composers.

There is no need to look for “meaning” in a poem by trying to decode its “symbols,” (unless you’ve been asked to do this in a paper for a class) as you can leave that job to those who are always happy to tell us what a poem “means.” Instead, as a reader or writer of poetry, try to allow the experience of the poem to create its presence within you, exactly as you describe so beautifully having done here with this poem. I still believe what the poet Archibald Macleish said at the end of his great poem, “Ars Poetica,” (first published almost one hundred years ago): A poem should not mean/But be.

—David St. John

Dear Lilah,

I loved your letter and knowing, as you say, that you “read a lot of poetry in an attempt to better understand the world around me and the world within me.” I also admired your initial reluctance to trying to express, through some analysis or paraphrase, those things that you treasure most in poems—those aspects of our lives that often feel unsayable to us, or sometimes even beyond language, but which poets often seem able to enfold (yet, also, to reveal) in their poems with the music of the imagination, while offering us images found both in experience and memory. Sometimes, poets can enact for us, in the lyrical language of their poems, an experience that we feel we’re able to share through some resonant and familiar recognition; and, at other times, we can feel we’ve been given some truly new way of seeing or understanding the world. 

I was also excited for you, hearing that you were at a point where you are about to leave for college with your clearly marvelous sense of curiosity and your excitement about finding out about the motivations, hopes, and reasons that, perhaps, people make the choices that they make—but also with your curiosity about their own reckonings with those choices, both good and ill. What you are describing, in fact, is exactly the essential curiosity that drives a good writer and, clearly, if being a writer is something you are considering, whether in poetry or prose, I hope you’ll pursue that. I hope too you will find writers at your college (some fellow students as well as teachers) with whom you’ll feel you can begin to explore your own connection to literature--and maybe a future in writing.

Now, let me say that you, in fact, are one of the few readers who has recognized or discovered the connection between my poem, “Hush,” which was published forty-five years ago, and this poem, “In the High Country.” You ask with incredible insight and maturity, “I wonder if that hush is the same as ‘This hush & this pause.’ If so, how did you create two radically different poems out of that same hush, one full of pain and the other full of purpose? Was writing this poem for you as cathartic as reading it was for me?”

The short answer is, yes, it is indeed the same “hush” but understood differently after the passage of time, and with, I think, a far greater sense of perspective, even self-forgiveness. You might be amused to know that my son, the boy of both poems, tells me that he himself still hasn’t decided whether he likes better “Hush” or “In the High Country.” I’ve told him, of course, that he doesn’t need to choose—they both belong to him.

—David St. John

Dear Maia,

I want to thank you for your wonderful letter, which (in your beautiful writing) so richly weaves the lines of the poem through your truly gorgeous and cinematic imagined “pictures” as they develop in ways that resonate perfectly with the sense of place, peace and beauty that I’d hoped a reader might find in the landscape of the poem and also in the hope (at the poem’s end) that, even when we feel ourselves to be “no one,” we are each (as you say in your letter so powerfully) always a somebody to someone; and, often, we are not simply somebody but often somebody who is truly important and essential to, and beloved and admired by, that someone—just as you clearly are by your teachers, team-mates, friends, parents . . . and most importantly, I imagine, by your sister, your twin.

I want you to remember that what you say here, and say so beautifully—“I want to be somebody who is accepted and beloved so deeply, that I am not myself”— is often true of all of us, every one of us. We all at times are not “ourselves” or choose a kind of invisibility in order to feel safe in this complicated world, especially when we fear that, if we are truly known by someone else, we might run the risk of not being liked, or of not being “enough,” or of not fulfilling their ideas of who we should be or could be. Because we all feel this, we each need to struggle against this fear. We each need to make ourselves known to each other because, otherwise, we simply don’t have the right to say about anyone, either family or friends, “They don’t understand me.” If we haven’t been able to tell others who we are, how can we expect them ever to know? Unless we can say to others who we are, and why we care about the things we care about, then we’re simply forcing them to guess—and, as you probably know from experience, if we do that, then they will always guess wrong.

Sometimes, writing poems helps us to learn not only how to recognize who we are and who we wish to be, but it can also help us to find the right language too. Reading poems and writing poems helps us to gather into ourselves the language that we can use to share what we feel and believe with another person. Think how many times one of your friends has said about someone they care about, “We just can’t talk to each other.” Even if we feel we can show another person how much they are a somebody to us, we still need to be able to tell them; it’s easy to forget that we all have the same fear that you name in your letter so powerfully—the fear of not being the somebody we wish to be, to the someone who matters most to us.

I also love that you asked, How can someone be somebody, but no one? The flip side of that question is, of course, If we feel like no one, how can we be somebody to someone? The speaker of the poem “In the High Country” at times understands that, in the larger scheme of the world, he may seem to others (and even to himself) like “no one.” Sometimes, the speaker might even choose to be “no one,” in order to be relieved, however briefly, of the enormous responsibility that comes with being somebody, that is, being a person in the world. But he’s a lucky man, of course, in that he has someone, the son of the poem, for whom he will always be the somebody who is also that father. We are all “no one” at first, and that’s perfectly fine. We just need to discover in our lives the many someone’s for whom we already are (you name some of these already, in your letter) or for whom we might one day become: Somebody. But don’t worry. In time, you will find them all.

—David St. John