What Are Poets For? Joanna Macy’s Visit to Our 2020 Class

Watch the video of Joanna Macy’s guest visit to our 2020 course, What Are Poets For?:

https://www.philopoetics.com/post/what-are-poets-for-joanna-macy-s-visit-to-our-2020-class

In the spring of 2020, while the world was trembling in the first waves of pandemic grief, we gathered in virtual space to ask an ancient question: What are poets for? This class, facilitated in collaboration with Francisco and inspired by the seismic tenderness of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours, became a sanctuary for language, silence, and shared aliveness.

One of the most luminous moments of our time together was a guest visit from Joanna Macy. Activist, scholar of systems theory and Buddhism, and co-translator of Rilke’s Book of Hours with Anita Barrows, Macy met us not only as a teacher, but as a living poem. At ninety-one, she beamed into our class from her home, bringing the immediacy of breath and memory, the spaciousness of practice, and the intimacy of long friendship with the poet's voice.

Her translation of Rilke is not merely textual—it is devotional. Each phrase in Book of Hours is lit by the fierce compassion of someone who has given her life to the healing of our planet and its people.

“You, God, who live next door—if at times, through the long night, I trouble you with my urgent knocking—this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom. I know you're all alone in that room. If you should be thirsty, there's no one to get you a glass of water. I wait, listening. Always. Just give me a sign! I'm right here.”

We are forever grateful to Joanna Macy for her presence, for her life’s work, and for reminding us, at a time of great uncertainty, that poetry is not an escape from the world—it is a way into it. It is one of the oldest technologies of transformation we have.

And for that, we keep knocking.

—Petra Salazar

Philopoetics