We all have to find our own way to relate to this issue if we want to stay alive. Poetry can bring a lot to science, without sentimentality. And this is a way for poetry to be of use. Science is spectrum analysis. Art is photosynthesis.
Art saves lives.
What art does is give us a sense of the whole, a sense that there is a universe out there that we are part of, that is worth saving, and that we are valuable because we are part of that cloth of community, and that we can, through our imaginations, through feeding our spirits, create the tools we need to save the whole. But there will be those of you reading this who need to know that Michael Cuddihy, the poet and famed founder and editor of Ironwood , an important, a necessary poetry journal he published for sixteen years before closing it in 1988, died recently of pneumonia at his home in Tucson. He was sixty-eight. He had a critical eye, and is credited with bringing writers such as Tess Gallagher and Linda Gregg to prominence. He published Robert Hass, Jane Miller, Alberto Rios, Ai and George Oppen.