John Steinbeck, Poetry, and Knowing

If you know anything at all about me, I bet you know that John Steinbeck is my all-time favorite writer. And our recent thinking about visualization has reminded me of what he once wrote about poetry in a letter to Herbert Sturz, an undergraduate student at Columbia University: “With the rhythms and symbols of poetry one can get into the reader—open him up and while he is open introduce on an intellectual level things he would not or could not receive unless he were opened up.” Didn’t you feel “opened up” and totally receptive to what Steinbeck wanted us to feel and therefore know about the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath?

It’s so interesting to think that Steinbeck so purposefully evoked his readers’ senses so that he could, in fact, teach us something. I think the same must be true of all writers—the good ones anyway. They want us to know what they know, and they understand that if they select just the right words, frame them in just the right way, appeal to just the right senses, they’ll hit a nerve that will go directly to the brain and open us up to a flood of emotion and, yes, intellectual acceptance. I wonder what Lester Laminack wanted us to feel and know when he wrote so lovingly about his Mammaw in Saturdays and Teacakes, or what Jonathan London hoped we’d understand about the threatened gray wolf when he wrote The Eyes of Gray Wolf. Feeling, experiencing, knowing—each so connected to the others and all part of how we learn.