A Crackling Fire of Hope
Kentucky poet laureate Silas House on how poetry serves as a theological lesson, a source of community, and a lifeline during the upheaval of 2025.
Silas House poetry essay. Kentucky poet laureate essay. Hope in divided America.
I have survived every trouble of my life by turning to the natural world, to dogs, and, always, to words and music. Songs have carried me throughout my life. Books have been there when I felt so alone I didn’t know if I could keep going. And poems have saved me, over and over.
When I was in seventh grade, I had a remarkable English teacher named Sandra Stidham. She was known for being hard and strict. The first day of class, before she said a word to us, she stood before the class and read a passage from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence” that included these two lines:
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart!
As she finished the poem, I could see tears in her eyes. I had never seen an adult moved by a piece of literature. I had already been moved by poems and stories, but until that moment, I did not feel I had permission to give myself over completely to art. Something unlatched in me upon witnessing a teacher willing to make herself vulnerable before her students. And seeing I was not the only one who had such intense feelings about collections of words gave me permission to keep going forward as an artist. Ms. Stidham not only made it okay for me to feel connected to words, but her one simple act also helped to forge me as an artist. I wanted to make people feel the way she had felt in reading that poem.
But there was more. I was raised in a fundamentalist sect that took scripture literally. Millay’s poem, which made her famous in 1912 when she was only twenty, suggested God could be found in nature, that his very heart might be found by parting blades of grass. This was revolutionary to imagine. It had been drilled into me I should only picture God as an old white man with a big flowing beard, resting in the clouds and watching all of us with judgmental wrath. That poem showed me a whole new concept of the divine. As someone who had been forced to go to church three or four times a week for long services, I often longed to be out in the creeks and hills instead of stuck within four walls, listening to a preacher as he beat the Bible and strutted the aisles like a bantam rooster. This poem validated the way I felt when I was in the woods or wading in the creek. The God of My Understanding was best found in the natural world, not chapels or cathedrals. So I also had my first real theological lesson by listening to my teacher recite this poem. About four years later, when I left that little church in protest of its bigotry, I lost my community and much of my family. I would wander in the wilderness alone for many years as I tried to shape my identity. During those years, my solace would be found in secular books, poems, and music, as well as in dogs and nature. I would not have been as well prepared for this time alone without that moment of my teacher sharing the Millay poem with us.
It only takes one teacher to unlock something in us. It only takes one poem to set us free.
There have been other teachers and other poems, but that teacher and that poem provided the doors I needed to get me started. Those other poems saw me through the most trying times of my life, times of deep grief, hollowed-out sadness, and even the darkest days when I didn’t think I could keep going. But there were always poems to get me on my feet again.
In the days since the November 2024 election, I have noticed a resurgence in poetry, which reminds me it is one of the forms of art best suited to carry us through troubled times. One excerpt from a poem that has popped up a lot on social media ever since the 2016 election comes from Bertolt Brecht, written when he was exiled from his home country of Germany because he was a strident anti-Nazi:
Lately I’ve been trying to find a balance of remaining informed without being overwhelmed by witnessing the toxicity on display. And I’ve discovered that poems are the antidotes to misery.
In the dark times
will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
The hope in that poem, to me, is that we will continue to sing, no matter what. The more depressing aspect is that in troubled times we cannot help but to fixate on the trouble. Although written in the late 1930s, Brecht could just as easily be talking about the very modern habit of doom-scrolling, or how every dinner party conversation inevitably turns to the mind-boggling events happening in our country every day.
Like many of us, lately I’ve been trying to find a balance of remaining informed without being overwhelmed by witnessing the toxicity on display. And I’ve discovered that poems are the antidotes to misery. They are also lessons in moderation. Poetry refuses to look away from the horrors of the world, but it also holds our faces firmly in its hands and forces us to witness the wonders, as well. To hear the singing.
I believe that in times of distress, poetry is more important than ever because poems provide this middle ground of being aware yet refusing to be swallowed by the doom. All we have to do is open ourselves up to literature, and the words we need will find us. All my life this has happened for me, and I am always thankful that pieces of art endure while they wait for the person in need to discover them. But I am even more thankful for those who taught me to always be on the lookout for them.
When I was struggling to come out, one poem was especially transformative for me, and it has been so helpful to many others. “Wild Geese” by the late Mary Oliver, a Millay devotee and one of the most beloved poets of our time, is a particular life-changer for anyone who has experienced religious trauma, as so many of us have, with its very first line: “You do not have to be good.” In the religious sect of my childhood, I was constantly exposed to relentless bigotry: sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia—if there was discrimination to be had, it was ripe in that pulpit. Although I knew I was gay and that I had tried to pray that away for years, that congregation had drilled into my subconscious that because of who I was, I was not good. A lie repeated is a powerful thing. It can take up residence in us so thickly that we sometimes cannot escape. But the first time I read “Wild Geese,” I was handed a hammer to break down those walls. Oliver was not saying I didn’t have to strive to be a good person. Instead, to my way of thinking, she was saying my definition of goodness did not need to be shaped by people interested in oppression.
Or perhaps she did not mean that—my phrasing of “to my way of thinking” is important here. Because I never met Oliver and could never ask her what exactly she meant. But it doesn’t matter. The poem offered a line for interpretation by a reader who needed it. Again: Art finds us when we need it most if we are open to receiving it. Her poem offered me hope, driving home its initial point by telling me:
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
The rest of the poem spoke to me as if each line had been written for me. And I believe they were. As a writer myself, I know the only audience I am writing for is the reader who needs my words in a particular moment. I only hope to reach that one person, the way Millay’s words moved my English teacher. If I can do that as an artist, then that makes all the work worth it.
We talk a lot about the way literature is the path to empathy. But even more, I believe it is a passage to hope. In a time when many of us feel abandoned by our elected officials, more and more of us turn to our artists to find representation. And thankfully, more of us are turning to poetry. It’s the perfect medium for our overwhelmed times of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. We can consume poems in a handful of minutes, then digest them slowly in our thinking over the course of the day, staying active with us the way the best balms do.
Many of us talked about being frightened of what loomed ahead, worried for people we love, sad for the shape of things. Yet we were happy there together, eating and laughing, finding optimism in our community.
Salvation South is helping us by providing the kinds of poetry that we are looking for, even if we don’t know it yet. As a magazine that offers literature to people for free, an incredible service is being provided to us, and one that is even more important in these volatile and vitriolic times. I’m thankful to have this resource to find the words that can help me on days when the news-clouds are so thick and gray I am unsure if the sun will ever penetrate them again. But then, I hear a song. Then, I find a poem. And so, in closing, I offer one more little story to you, and one more little poem.
A couple weeks after the election, a friend of mine put together a little outdoor party where we all stood around blazing wood fires in the cold, eating stew and drinking wine, swaddled in thick coats and wool caps under a gibbous moon. We were together, completely focused on one another. There was nothing but the sound of human voices and the crackling of the fires. While there, many of us talked about being frightened of what loomed ahead, worried for people we love, sad for the shape of things. Yet we were happy there together, eating and laughing, finding optimism in our community.Friends, good food, wood smoke, a big night sky: These are the opposites of despair. They are primal goodnesses. The gathering conjured hope in me, and the hope lit the match for a little poem that I hope might offer comfort to someone who needs it:
When times are dark
build a crackling fire
and gather good people.
Silas House poetry essay. Kentucky poet laureate essay. Hope in divided America.
Silas House is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of seven novels, including Lark Ascending, which won the 2023 Southern Book Prize. He is a 2024 Grammy finalist, a 2022 recipient of the Duggins Prize (the largest award for an LGBTQ writer in the nation), and he currently serves as the poet laureate of Kentucky. Recently he has been published in Time, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and many other publications. House's first collection of poetry, All These Ghosts, will be published by Carolina Wren this September.
