Breaking Through - Page 9


Whyte has often spoken of the subversive quality of poetry: its power to undermine received truth and even assumed ideas of what truth is. In "Loaves and Fishes," he writes,

This is not

the age of information.

This is not

the age of information.

Forget the news,

and the radio,

and the blurred screen.

This is the time

of loaves

and fishes.

People are hungry,

and one good word is bread

for a thousand.

"I thought the first line of the poem was such a wicked line that I wrote it again—it was wonderful just to say it, an act of freedom," Whyte said a number of years ago. As a society, we're subject to "an astonishing barrage of information, which is attempting to give us coordinates as to where we are, but places us in an entirely two-dimensional and false map of the world."

Words can starve and words can nourish; words can imprison us and words can set us free. Poetry does the surprising, subversive work of helping people break through the thick screen of received wisdom, the conflated "facts" of predigested reality, the endless stream of "news" that contains nothing new, and feeds them something fresh and good. Its power passes right through the public, smiling, agreeable persona we present to the world and goes directly to the private, yearning, inner self, which meets it with just this small, vital shock of recognition: "Yes, this speaks to me as I truly am. Yes!"

Mary Sykes Wylie, Ph.D., is a senior editor of the Psychotherapy Networker. Contact: maswylie@mgemaine.com. Letters to the editor about this article may be sent to letters@psychnetworker.org.

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