“Poetry that speaks to the enduring and irreversible coordinates of human fate – love, striving, fear of pain, hope, the fleeting nature of things, and death – leads us to believe that the poet is one of us, and shares in that fate. ”
Irene Vallejo writes in Papyrus, her study of the development of books, that Western poetry began in the Greek oral tradition because “rhythmic language was easiest to remember.” That strikes me as sensible and obvious. She goes on to say that she can remember poems she learned to recite in school “with extraordinary clarity.” Unfortunately, I don’t share that talent. I can recall snatches of verse – Whose woods these are … darn it, I think I know… – but no more. And yet, curiously, I can remember the words to at least several hundred songs. Somehow music, not rhythm, is the glue that holds things in my memory. This has not diminished the power of poetry for me. But that power comes with an abundance of mystery, confoundment, and trepidation.
How can one write about poetry? What can be said that adds to poems themselves? But another question is: how can one not? There’s too much to say about poetry. Where to start, and how dare I address it in so slight a format as a blog post?
On top of that, there’s a personal conundrum: I love poetry, yet I don’t have a poetic lobe in my brain. And yet, sometimes I try to create it. I’m at war with myself. How is this possible? Stuff happens, is how.
Poetry remains largely a mystery to me; and like all art and some other areas of life, like the universe itself, I tend to think it should stay that way. Part of the beauty lies in the mystery: in the idea that a) the world isn’t fully fathomable and b) we wouldn’t want it to be. An omnipotent being, divine or otherwise, would have to sit on the subway staring into space, with nothing to read or look at or think about, because they already know everything: boring!
All art (and I’m using “art” broadly to mean anything that sparks pleasure, insight, imagination, connection, or a sense of well-being) depends on this very quality of mystery, on our not knowing everything. In fact, everything spiritual – love, art, nature, religion, friendship, anything that connects us to what is beyond ourselves – is mysterious precisely because it’s beyond ourselves. It is not wholly knowable, and we play with our uncertainty, even revel in it. It’s also because, through such connections, we somehow manage to soften the boundaries of the self and melt into the universe. Maybe we’re hardwired to want two seemingly contradictory things: to assert ourselves in the world, qua selves, and to melt into that larger whole and disappear. Both are necessary and hopelessly imperfect enterprises. Most of us can’t fully merge with one another or with the universe. We are ultimately selves. Yet we are always engaged with and influenced by and needing and wanting to merge with other things and other selves.
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As I said, I’ve been moved on occasion to try to write poetry, but the results haven’t been great in my estimation. I can’t say for sure because (with a few exceptions) I don’t trust anyone to critique them. I’m reminded of the words of Anne Bradstreet, the first woman ever to publish poetry in the New World, who addressed her own work as “Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain.”
Maybe the main reason why I resist the urge to poetry is my analytic bent, my precious left-brain. The absence of native talent might be another. But the analyst in me protests: What does it mean to be a poet? It’s not like you need to pass an exam or get a license. And do I like the poems I write? Well, sort of, in the same way as I kind of like myself with certain misgivings.
But here’s the thing, and then I’ll stop self-analyzing: much as I love poetry and fiction and admire those who create it, I’ve never wanted to be a poet or a fiction writer of any kind. I don’t even like the idea of writing fiction or poetry; I find it vaguely threatening. That’s how deeply I identify, almost unwillingly, with nonfiction and with my dominant left brain. (I’m using the term metaphorically because the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy is no longer considered sound.)
But enough about me – except to say that I adore Whitman and Dickinson, who tower over American verse, and also Yeats, Auden, MacNeice, and Heaney; Hart Crane, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Archibald MacLeish, Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, and on and on. If I ever needed an excuse not to write poems, it’s that Collins does it for me and does a far better job of it. He may not be my favorite poet, but he’s the one who most embodies my emerging (as it were) poetic sensibility.
My verse, such as it is, comes from a place of authenticity, which may not be the best place for poems to spring from. The poems invariably emerge in the same way: they come out of my subconscious more or less fully formed, and most often directly from dreams; and I don’t do much editing after the birth. Simply put, I’m like an obese woman who doesn’t know she’s pregnant until suddenly, something pops out, and not much can be done to reshape it. The difference, of course, is that some of my poetic offspring need to be recycled.
I’m happy to let my subconscious do the heavy lifting; that’s what it’s there for. But I’m not sure that’s how really good poetry happens. I suspect it involves hard work. But to be honest, I don’t know how really good poetry happens, except that real poets live in the world, not in the clouds; and they may exploit their subconscious but they slave over the stuff once it’s down on paper.
So, I’m in no position to tell you what makes good poetry good. But I do have some ideas that I’d like to share about how to access the beauty and the mystery. Or at least, what works for me: what renders certain poets not just accessible but transcendent. What makes their work art. And my favorite definition of art is from the writer Shirley Hazzard: “…an endless access to revelatory states of mind.”
What services exactly does poetry provide for me? Most obviously, it compensates for, or complements, the dominant analytic side of my mind, the boring side if you will; but that begs the question of what it actually does. More precisely, poetry offers a multitude of alternate voices, alternate ways of playing with language and bending it towards or away from reality, and of playing (as great art does) with the boundaries of reality itself. For whatever reason, I need to hear other voices than my own, and to hear language used in ways that I do not and cannot.
And then there’s the sheer beauty of it, which is part and parcel of the aforesaid. Artistic beauty is never “sheer”; rather, it’s an emergent quality of other things: unique ways of expressing things using words, paint, the voice, the body, musical instruments, cave walls, and so on. The poets who speak to me are like tour guides of humanity, or perhaps traffic cops at the intersection of thought, vision, language, nature, experience. It’s a big intersection, and there are no traffic lights. When I talk to you about my relationship to poetry, I’m not a real traffic cop, more like one of those people in my neighborhood who volunteer, during a blackout, to direct traffic – an ordinary citizen in a vest helping you to cross Poetry Avenue.
Again, what poetry does for me, most of all, is this: it gives me access to voices, ways of seeing and feeling and thinking, that I wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s a vampire-like sucking of the lifeblood of others’ imaginations to enrich one’s own. There’s no substitute for this parasitic process. Picking more daisies, meditating, walking, even conversation, as expanding as it is compared to those other activities, can’t provide the confrontation with human otherness that poetry does. Here's just one random example of the pull of poetry – the opening stanza of an unpublished poem by a friend of mine named Zohra:
The thin ice of love
Etched with my husband’s face,
The artful skating.
Underneath, flails
Pain and loss and failing.
Yes, even in my writing group, we have some wonderful poets. Ana, Cynthia, Heidi, Zohra. I’ve learned from them that even if you can’t rewrite someone else’s poem, you can talk about it. It took me a while to realize this. Before and even after publication, a poem, like anything written, is a conversation between writer and reader. Not the Ten Commandments.
A broader question for the liberal arts is how exactly someone can teach, and learn, to appreciate poetry – or art in general. The power of words can surely be taught to some extent, by example, by repetitive exposure, by drawing on our latent ability and desire to have words inform, expand, and beguile us. But of course, you must also experience the stuff on your own, and learn the ways in which you respond to it personally, both during and after class. Your senses and imagination must be awakened, helped to their feet, and made to walk on their own.
I had some good teachers back in the day. But to feel, and to link thought with feeling, is ultimately the work of the self. You have to look at a painting, hear a piece of music, read a poem, on your own terms as well as on the artist’s terms, and find the connecting pathways. All of which is obvious enough, and not as hard as it sounds. You don’t have to get it all – and what is “it all” anyway? At whatever level we engage with art, something new, unique, and personal usually happens.
Here then are a few modest suggestions for unlocking the door to the garden of poetry. (Notethe change of metaphors in midstream.)
First, heed the words of Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson: “Do not take counsel of thy fears.” Even the most difficult or obscure poets must somehow reach out to us, or they fail. Don’t worry about getting all of it. Meet the poet somewhere in the middle, because there are only middles: regions between two minds where awareness is imperfectly shared. No poet – no person in fact – can unlock or understand everything they want to share. Poets don’t necessarily understand themselves better than the rest of us. They just have better ways with words, and their ways may shed light. (“Ways with words,” however, is a lot more complicated than I’m making it sound.)
My second and third suggestions go together, but as opposites. In more poetic terms, they are a contradictory sandwich. The second is: dare to read a poem literally (at least at first). Consider what the poet is actually saying, as opposed to what else she or he might be connoting or evoking. Deeper meanings will emerge gradually and are inseparable from feeling. Meaning, like beauty, is a vague, emergent quality of other things. Poems can make you work, but they can’t make you do all the work.
My third idea for accessing poetry is: listen to the pure sound of the words as music. Read it aloud and listen to your voice. Because poetic language is music, among other things; language (unless it’s written in Braille) is sound. Not every great poem is lyrical or creates meaning or beauty out of the sheer sound of the language; but many poems do this.
A limitation of this sound-only approach (and I’m suggesting one apply these techniques serially, not exclusively) is that sound is related to voice: to the unique ways in which a poet uses language, ways that have a character of their own, but may or may not have a music of their own. (Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams come to mind as distinctive yet, to my ear, non-musical poets. Focusing on sound is just a first step.
One of my favorite examples of sound-rich poetry is a piece by Richard Wilbur titled “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra”. This gorgeous poem positively burbles and drips and sprays sound like the very object that it is describing. A runner-up is “A Map of Verona” by Henry Reed. It’s not quite as musical as Wilbur’s, but just as mysterious and wonderful.
Becoming more alive to sound and sight, meaning and feeling; becoming more alive period: these are the rewards of reading poetry. By approaching language playfully, they make words jiggle, shimmer, and bleed new meaning, new feeling; yield pleasures of which we cannot speak, and enrich the project of connecting us: of knowing who we are, what the world is, and where we are in the world.