Do We Really Hate Poetry? [vol.1, no.5, Poetry Central]

Do We Really Hate Poetry?

We hate poetry.  Oh c’mon, admit it.  It makes our skin crawl.  That poem in second grade?  Everyone laughed as the words rang out, How do I love Thee?  Let me count the ways…  The boy in the second row was imitating you reading it by bobbing his head back and forth like a pendulum and you were counting the ways you were going to pummel him afterwards.    

We hate bad poetry.  But we also hate good poetry.  We hate Milton and John Donne, not because we’ve read them, but because they wrote poetry in the seventeenth century.  We hate the sound of the word Haiku, and we especially hate the people that recite their homemade haikus in their peppermint oil baths.

I went through about a decade-long spate of hating poetry.  But I started out being a pretty sensitive, inquisitive young anarchist existentialist-type.  At about the same age I started to smoke (coincidentally), drive cars and like girls, I became interested in such odd poets as Alan Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Charles Bukowski.  This was all to support my Bob Dylan habit, who I discovered was deeply influenced by these “Beat” poets.  I tried to memorize Ginsberg’s HOWL, but was so severely castigated by my parents, that I had to go underground with my insatiable hunger for beat poetry.

Then, a major epiphany.  My poetical life history was deeply affected by the public reading of one of my poems in a Senior High English writing class.   Mr. Frisbie, after reciting my poem to the class of about a dozen forlorn philosophers, put the paper down on his desk and solemnly proclaimed that Frost would have been brought to tears by this magnificent poem (I assumed he meant in a good way).  Later that night I looked up Robert Frost in my Funk and Wagnall’s and embarked on a life of poetry.

The aforementioned ‘life of poetry’ lasted about two years, after which I unceremoniously threw myself into the wonders of mathematics, biochemistry, medical school, and a very lovely woman who is now my wife.  The left brain was exercised to the exclusion of the right, which atrophied and nearly wasted away.  There was a period of about five years, I think, after our first child was born, when I fled from all things poetic.  Perhaps it was a latent reaction from getting so amped up about it in high school, then completely dropping it (PTPE, Post-Traumatic Poetry Experience).  I remember reading with disdain various poems I’d find on greeting cards, my own horrific poems that I kept in a drawer in my desk, or ones that I’d find in magazines.  One, in particular, stands out, a poem (Gunga Din) by Rudyard Kipling, which I read in my dentist’s waiting room.  When my name was called, I threw down the magazine and wondered what good a poem could do for a guy waiting on a root canal.  (How weak the mind’s eye before oral surgery!).

I don’t think I wrote one single poem for over ten years.  That’s quite a hiatus, and not the kind of factoid you'll find in most poet biographraphies (doesn’t bode well for me).   Never mind.  How could I ever have imagined, in my wildest dreams, that I’d end up so loony-binned on poetry?  Mr. Frisbie may have seen it coming; but for me, it took me quite by surprise.

Well, the point here is not to force anyone to like poetry.  Where would we be without folks with opinions?  You don’t think poets are opinionated?  Yeah, right!  My own dear, supportive wife can take poetry or leave it, like jam on toast.  She’s blunt, and she’s a good critic.  And I listen to her (you think I’m crazy?)

The comment thread below is for you!  Why not take this opportunity to tell me why you hate poetry?  Or, as I have done, you can leave a few remarks why you don’t hate poetry.  I’ve chosen to do this thematically, but please feel free to express yourselves in what ever manner you wish. 

Top 10 Reasons Why Ed Doesn’t Hate Poetry 10

10

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name …
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

—from "Easter 1916”  W.B. Yeats 

I can remember where I was, what I was doing, and how it felt the first time I read Yeats’ unsurpassed poem on the Irish uprising against the British Empire.  The poem, like none other, makes us aware of real people in its chilling use of names in the verse, not to mention one of the greatest closing lines in all of poetry.

Haiku.  I can say it, and I can read it, and I can try to write it.  If you take the time to read some really good haiku, you’ll discover something strange (I suggest googling  “haiku poems” and checking out some very early classical examples which are abundant on the net).  The sparseness of verse (many forms, but traditionally, only 17 syllables in three lines) gives an opportunity to grasp a simple truth in the twinkling of an eye.  Boom!  Instant awareness.  Better than a CTU raid on the Russian embassy!

Spring departs.
Birds cry
Fishes' eyes are filled with tears

—Basho

 8

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have
                           settled
               after a night of rain.
       I dip my cupped hands. I drink
              a long time. It tastes
    like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
          deep inside me, whispering
        oh what is that beautiful thing
                that just happened?

If you haven’t read this contemporary poet, you really should.  Born in 1935, Oliver’s poems reflect her passionate, positive, and uplifting observation of the natural world with vibrant and inspiring use of language to evoke a feeling.  She has been favorably compared to Whitman and Thoreau.

In this book birds are taught their flying

by that which would make them fall

were they not to fly as had been taught.

The book is roughly bound, and left

open on a couch.  The page is illustrated

and, lifted to the light, displays

a moralizing scene:  two children have tied

a third to the wheel of an enormous carriage.

A group of elderly women look on with pride.

It is a scent of such astonishing strength,

why, Leopold, there are flowers hidden

throughout the room.  There must be for I

cannot sleep without the noise of a bouquet,

and gently, gently, sir, you know

I sleep most gently in this small room.

This ‘gentle’ whisper of a poem was written by Jesse Ball, and I read it last year

(2006) when it appeared in The Paris Review, one of the top poetry journals.  For me it conveys a blending of many thoughts, feelings and events all happening in one telling and leaving me with an utterly astonished sense that I just watched a very important unfolding of meaning.

I placed a Jar in Tennessee

—first line from a Wallace Stevens poem  

A teaser, and a homework assignment.  If you haven’t read the poem by Wallace Stevens,

Anecdote of the Jar, you had better google it or find it in your Anthology; and after you read it, you’ll never be the same.  No, I won’t provide an active link.  You have to be more motivated than that!  It’s different.  Read it and report back.  FYI, Stevens is on my top five favorite-poets list.

All look and likeness caught from earth
All accident of kin and birth,
Had pass'd away. There was no trace
Of aught on that illumined face,
Uprais'd beneath the rifted stone
But of one spirit all her own ;--
She, she herself, and only she,
Shone through her body visibly.

—Phantom, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

See comments following next entry.

WHY art thou silent! Is thy love a plant

Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air

Of absence withers what was once so fair?

Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant?

Yet have my thoughts for thee been vigilant--

Bound to thy service with unceasing care,

The mind's least generous wish a mendicant

For naught but what thy happiness could spare.

Speak -- though this soft warm heart, once free to hold

A thousand tender pleasures, thine and mine,

Be left more desolate, more dreary cold

Than a forsaken bird's-nest fill'd with snow

'Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine--

Speak, that my torturing doubts their end may know.

—Speak, William Wordsworth 

The great “nature” poet, Wordsworth, with so much to say that goes far beyond observation, using language as an art form, wrote poetry to be understood and appreciated by the common man, that told of things we all experience, and then packs a wallop in the universal themes he so easily extracts and brings to the fore.  Coleridge, the great poet of imagination, utilized amazing skills in language, poetic diction and specialized stories such as “Kubla Khan” to illustrate deep truths in human nature and behavior.  Interestingly, the two poets maintained a close authorial relationship and friendship during their professional careers.  It has been said, though I will not vouch for the veracity of the notion, that, in the virtual here-and-now, a certain John F. Walter and a certain Edward D. Nudelman have been linked together in some sort of metaphysical way to the aforementioned two poets.  I’ll leave it to your imagination which is which.

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage

.—first lines from Auguries, William Blake

Okay, I’ve read this poem a million times, and I’m freaking out over it once again.  A poem that spans all time, all cultures, all generations, all imagination. 

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

—Dylan Thomas 

This is one of my favorite of Dylan Thomas’ poems (I have so many favorites), and it’s the first poem I ever read by him.  It hit me hard then (I was 18) and it still does.  Why do we create?  No one ever said it better than Dylan Thomas.  I mean, he said it for himself, not that we should do our art for that exact reason.  Thomas has many, many lesser known poems that are every bit as powerful, and some ineffable masterpieces (Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, Fern Hill, Where Once the Waters of Your Face, etc.)  It is well worth reading through a Dylan Thomas collection of poetry.

And, the number one reason why I don’t hate poetry, is……..

THE WINDHOVER, by Gerard Manley Hopkins (written in 1918)

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom
 of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, -- the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, o my chevalier!
  No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Summary (from Speak What We Feel, by Frederick Buechner)

“The bird—a kestrel, or falco tinnunculus—is sometimes called a windhover because of its uncanny ability to remain stationary over one spot by flying into the wind at precisely the wind’s speed, beating its quivering (“wimpling”) wings more slowly as the gusts diminish and more rapidly as they pick up again.  After the hover, if nothing catches its eye on the ground, it banks against the wind like a skater heeling around a bend or speeds down-wind on the “rolling level underneath him steady air” until with a sudden about turn and upward swoop or “stride” it resumes its hovering.  If it spots quarry, it makes a sloping descent with wings held high and tense above its back.  Along with many other readers I take the difficult word “buckle” to refer, among other things, to this downward maneuver, which it seems to me is at the heart of the poem’s meaning, as it is evoked also by the parallel images of the last three lines.  It is when the “sheer plod” of the plowman presses the plowshare down hard into the furrow that burnishes it that the metal shines brightest.  It is in falling and galling (in the sense of breaking or wounding) themselves that the blue-beak embers reveal the splendor of the fire within.  It is Christ in his glory that is represented by the bird in the full majesty of flight, but more glorious still is the incarnation, when, like the bird buckling, Christ descends into the world’s suffering to be born in a stable and die on a cross between thieves for the world’s sake.”

I felt the need to reprint this entire commentary, because, in my mind, not a better explication of a poem exists in print.  Anywhere.  For those that have tracked with me this far, I urge you to now go back and re-read Hopkins’ poem, then consider how much more the poem opens up and speaks to you in many different ways.  Is this not the greatness of poetry?

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Written by Edward Nudelman, Books Correspondent for POETRY CENTRAL

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