The poet Erica Funkhouser grew up on a farm in Massachusetts, and it was there—many occasions whereas wandering by way of the woods—that she grew enchanted by language. She beloved the music of phrases, “the form of clang of them collectively and the sound and the playfulness of them,” she later stated in an interview. All through her profession, she has continued to explain, joyfully, the pure world, “the place all of the discoveries, wondrous or determined, come with out names.”

Sooner or later, although, she additionally realized that writing can fail to seize actual brutality. “The dangers are innumerable: sentimentality, over-generalization, over-simplification, distortion, and preaching, to call a couple of,” she wrote in a 2005 essay on warfare poetry. The identical 12 months, she printed “The Pianist Upstairs,” a poem through which she sounds exhausted, uncertain of the important goodness of language and even of the likelihood that artwork can heal a lot in any respect. Listening to her neighbor play the piano, she’s moved by the best way he expresses emotional fact with out making an attempt to wrangle it into phrases. However his track, she notes, received’t change something past the stairway the place she sits.

It’s a bleak notion. And but, as deeply as I really feel her disillusionment, I don’t discover myself satisfied that artwork is meaningless, or that music is “wasted” within the face of struggling. In any case, the pianist upstairs impelled her to jot down a poem—and practically a decade later, the poem impels me to jot down this. The world stays a jagged place, crammed with injustice. However that injustice is at the least engaged, not ignored, by such cascading layers of listeners and readers. Higher for the echo of Brahms to fill Funkhouser’s hallway than for the hallway to stay silent, and higher for her poem to take the place of an empty web page.

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