Category Archives: Poetry

Why I read poetry

A few months ago, I posted a light-hearted look at mondegreens and malchichés. Clichés are useful to some extent because we believe we know what those phrases mean, and they serve the purpose of general communication. To confess “I’m feeling blue” can elicit compassion from a good friend, or help us to state a mood so that we might, possibly, move on from it. Popular song lyrics employ such figures of speech often, and often to good effect.

But clichés also leave something to be desired, don’t give a full enough account of the human situation. In the poem “Madame la Fleurie,” Wallace Stevens describes a man who looks into a mirror and believes what he sees depicts his actual life. But it is only a reflection; the image is “a page he found in the handbook of heartbreak.” A page in the handbook of heartbreak: that begins to express a more complex and specific feeling.

Poems can express every subtle shade of blue a person might feel. There is Emily Dickinson’s Hour of Lead and Elizabeth Bishop’s art of losing, Langston Hughes’ Weary Blues and Theodore Roethke’s desolation in immaculate places.  For thousands of years, poets have understood, and been able to convey, the vivid and expansive range of human emotions that our lively and energetic brains and souls experience—from unbearable grief to listless ennui, from a moment of surprising cheerfulness to the uplifting embrace of romantic or spiritual love. How poets accomplish this subtle connection between people, this empathy, amazes me. Especially as this mutual exchange of feelings takes place through the abstract medium of words.

This is why I read poetry. When a friend’s child died, I consoled myself with Ben Jonson’s words, “farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy” and nothing else seemed as apropos, even though the poem was composed almost 400 years ago. When life gets tough, Andrew Marvel’s lines about how feeble hope has tinsel wings in the face of magnanimous Despair just about sum up my feelings. Such poems may offer little cheer, yet they can comfort. Through gorgeous language and imagery that is honest if sometimes fanciful, good poems remind us that we are not alone in our circumstances.

Poems identify feelings, places, situations, and allusions to which another human being—perhaps hundreds of years or thousands of miles away—can relate. That relationship has a wonderful effect, for poetry offers a way to connect the rich and complicated scope of our humanity with the lives and sympathies of others, especially during troubled times. I know that my own heart begins rebounding from stress and gloom when I read Neruda’s lines: “through me, freedom and the sea/will bring solace to my downcast heart.” As we navigate through political and economic and personal hassles, we might want to open a poetry anthology now and then, or call up a website such as A Poem a Day or Verse Daily for a fix of shared humanity in an increasingly virtual world. After all, “What the heart longs for,” says Gregory Orr, “the poem accomplishes.”

One person who has taken this poetry inspiration into the wider world is Nicelle Davis. Check out her year-long poetry project at The Bees Knees.

The seed of disorder

“I am the seed of disorder.” –Paul Eluard

From an essay by Ezra Pound (published in The Exile):
“The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius. It consists in establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without specific effort.”

As Lewis Hyde, who excerpts the above passage in The Gift notes, Pound offers an implicit paradox here that he apparently could neither acknowledge nor accept. If “good” is order, how can it spread by “a sort of contagion”—surely a chaotic method of disseminating something supposedly well-structured?

Hmm. I turn now to Wallace Stevens—or rather, to Helen Vendler on Wallace Stevens—to examine further this “idea of order.” Vendler’s interpretation of the order in Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West” includes several approaches. There is order as in organization: the singer in Stevens’ poem creates and hence organizes her physical world. There is order as in command: she orders her world into being by singing, by language. Then there is order as magnitude: “The two Wordsworthian orders of mind and world…exquisitely fitted and yet subtly uneasy with each other,” notes Vendler. The tension Hyde finds and explicates in Pound’s Cantos also exists in Vendler’s examination of Stevens.

Eluard, a poet completely different in style, sensibility, and background from Pound and Stevens, identifies in his poem the workings of that tension, the DNA carrier, the seed of disorder which, it can be plausibly speculated, might well spread its own form of harmony without specific effort, traveling as seeds do through a myriad of dispersal mechanisms such as wind, burrs, digestion and expulsion, burial by mammals, flotation, and the like. (As a gardener, I am constantly amazed at these marvelous mechanisms.)

Well-fitted but uneasy together, disorder through its contagion moves harmony and order to grounds on which what inheres in the seed can survive, even thrive, as it organizes itself into maturity. The seed “follows orders” nature has imposed through genetics. Mind and world, order and self, establish themselves as “good.”

Without that seed of disorder, all is stasis. No art, nor mind nor world, can be produced unless the rebellious seed slips from stem, twig, womb, sac, or lamellae to sing its own idea of order into the world.

For some fabulous photographs of lamellae, see:

Hive Mind on FlickR

Affirmation

larch cones by Ann E. Michael

I am almost finished reading Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, and I think his conclusions about the self (person) in society and as individual are valid; I have long questioned the self-interest theory of philosophy but only on an intuitive basis as I am no philosopher, merely a student of the discipline.

What strikes me after having read this lengthy and rationally-argued book is that there are so many ways philosophical reasoning does actually intersect with that “most irrational” of impulses, art.

Here is a lovely excerpt from poet David Ignatow, from an essay he wrote in 1971:
“There is no contravening another person’s sense of himself and his world. We must accept it on his terms, though we need not accept it for ourselves…men and women have discovered themselves as individuals, and that this sense of individuality is something among them…In affirming themselves, they affirm all others.”

He later adds that poetry “is formed by the terms with which the person sees himself.”

It seems to me that Ignatow possessed an excellent understanding of the psychological and emotional as well as the rhetorical aspects of poetry–indeed, of any art.

Recitations

My brain still hurts, so I have decided to publish a radio commentary I did quite a few years back (for WDIY). If I can locate the mp3 file, I’ll post that, too.

I’ve chosen to post this essay for a number of reasons. The concept of having the time and the motivation to read, recall, and recite poetry seems like heaven to me at the moment. Then there’s the connection to rhythm, to pulse, that operates so fruitfully in metrical poetry. Finally, for sentimental reasons: it’s been ten years since my grandmother’s death, and now my parents have moved into an independent living community, and these events tend to lead to review, reflection, and—in my case—the desire to connect with poetry.

Recitations
—to the memory of Lucille Bohnstedt

My grandmother was born in 1909. As a child, she lived on a small farm in the Midwest, rising early to do chores, after which she’d study her homework by kerosene lamp. I once asked her what subjects she most enjoyed in school, and her answers surprised me. “I liked doing sums,” she told me, “And Latin, and poetry—I always liked poetry.”

This was a revelation. My grandma always seemed such a practical person; I wondered what it was she liked about Latin and poetry. I was aware of her devotion to crossword puzzles—caught up in the crossword craze during the 1920s, she never gave up her love of solving word challenges. I’m sure her Latin helped her decipher many an obscure word. But puzzles involve a different part of the brain than poetry.

I love poetry, so I had to probe more, curious about what my grandmother had studied and learned in verse. Did she recall which poets she liked? No, she had pretty well forgotten, but she liked rhyme and recitation. She had been good at memorizing lines—she liked the rhythms. And those old poems, they told such good stories, some of them sad…

Recitations! Such an old-fashioned concept, but still very popular in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Schoolchildren stood at the head of the class reciting their pieces, and poetic ballads were popular recitations at community gatherings and amateur nights; heart-rending tragedies like Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman” (1906) were extremely popular. While most of these poems rhymed, their defining feature is the strong rhythm in the lines which carried listeners —who had never experienced the constant blare of television—into the powerful surge of words. Poems such as Wordsworth’s “Lines”:

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs…

Or Sir Henry Wotton’s ecstatic poem “On a Bank as I sat Fishing:”

And now all Nature seemed in love;
The lusty sap began to move;
New juice did stir the embracing vines;
And birds had drawn their Valentines…”

Many a schoolchild recited Emerson’s “Concord Hymn,” the fourth line of which has become so famous that few of today’s Americans could tell you its origin—

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The ballads of Edgar Allen Poe—Annabelle Lee was a favorite—and Phoebe Cary’s ballad of the Dutch boy whose finger stemmed a breach in the dike, and Longfellow’s classic poetic stories— “Listen, my children, and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere…”—these were my grandmother’s texts, her introduction into poetry. I like to imagine my young grandmother milking cows in the darkness and murmuring “By the shores of Gitchie Gumee,/By the shining Big-Sea-Water,/Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,/Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis…” the sound of milk in the bucket echoing the rhythm of her hands as she milks. She earned an A in recitation from this practice. Maybe those resounding rhythms played some part in her steady endurance through a long lifetime that was not always easy.

My grandmother died in March of 2001, one less poetry-lover in the world. At her funeral I read Emily Dickinson’s “Farewell.”  This is the poem’s last verse—

Good-by to the life I used to live,
And the world I used to know;
And kiss the hills for me, just once;
Now I am ready to go.

~Here is a photo that shows Grandma’s less-practical side. She’s on the right (with her sister Faye), dressed in “flapper” style and riding side-saddle on a draft horse! I really ought to write a poem about this image.

Lewis, Buber, Dickinson

“Meeting with God does not come to man in order that he may concern himself with God, but in order that he may confirm that there is meaning in the world. All revelation is summons and sending.”   –Martin Buber, I and Thou

I suppose I ought to know this, but I cannot recall reading about whether C.S. Lewis was influenced by Martin Buber’s work, specifically I and Thou. Some of Lewis’ writing seems to suggest that he agrees with the concept of relation: as Buber describes it, the stepping out to meet Thou as Thou, and the insistence that “Man’s [sic] desire to possess God” keeps said man from true relation with God (a point described in The Great Divorce through the allegorical character of the Episcopal Ghost). God has become an “It” rather than a Thou for the Bishop, though he feels he is a true believer, an error made in lesser ways by other characters such as the Big Man.

Many of the students I tutor are writing their final papers for a Theology class that uses Lewis’ texts as a foundation for the course, which is why I’m feeling a bit conversant with Lewis lately, many long years after reading his fiction and his theological writings. And a random quote (above) that I read on a colleague’s email put me in mind of Buber, whose I and Thou reads, often, like poetry….which got me thinking about Emily Dickinson.

How’s that for a train of thought? Perhaps I need to examine the concatenation step by step.

1) Buber, I and Thou, a work deeply influenced by the author’s immersion in non-Western and Cabbalistic “mysteries” (the idea of the radii and the Centre closely parallels the Hindi conceptualization of Indra’s Net, just to name one example). Buber returns to the Western religious traditions throughout, though he mentions the way of Buddha and others as he examines the ever-present confrontation with the Thou of relational experience.

2) Lewis, The Great Divorce. Students interpret this work as one in which the author outlines his agreements and differences with, among other things, ideas about free will stemming from Socratic/Platonic through Augustinian and more modern concepts of Heaven/Hell. They tend to miss the concepts of what makes union/relation significant in the choice to unite with God, but they “get” the gist of the allegory.

3) Emily Dickinson, who more informally and more frequently uses “you” and “I” to explore these depths, but whose contrarian views on soul and spirituality knit the religious with the genuine in complex and exciting ways through the art of language.

An example, in which she does employ the King James Bible diction:

725

Where Thou art—that—is Home—
Cashmere—or Calvary—the same—
Degree—or Shame—
I scarce esteem Location’s Name—
So I may Come—

What Thou dost—is Delight—
Bondage as Play—be sweet—
Imprisonment—Content—
And Sentence—Sacrament—
Just We two—meet—

Where Thou art not—is Woe—
Tho’ Bands of Spices—row—
What Thou dost not—Despair—
Tho’ Gabriel—praise me—Sire—

—

How similar to Buber, those lines “And Sentence—Sacrament—/Just We two—meet—”

and the idea that “Where Thou art not—is Woe—”

Poetry precedes philosophy more often than not, though philosophy may object.

Lawn vs. meadow, and a doe

I was outdoors this morning, raking leaves and silently cussing the grass. Spouse and I hold different viewpoints about the necessity and maintenance of a lawn, and while I gave into his desire for a lawn many years ago, my argument has proven correct over time: we live in a meadow, and lawn-grass is not happy here. Now, as I rake leaves from the spotty, weedy, too-long ryegrass, I get exhilarated by the exercise and the crisp autumn air but steamed at the need to rake at all.

We don’t rake the meadow; it takes care of itself. This is what “low-maintenance lawn” means, that nature takes care of things without human intervention.

Besides, I have never harbored a yen for the classic British lawn—acres of clipped greensward don’t appeal to me. I always feel the great lawn is missing something: trees, a bed of flowers, a crescent of blooming shrubbery. Great lawns’ main appeal for me is that there are edges all along them. Edges are interesting. Large, plain, even swaths work mostly to draw my eye elsewhere. While our meadow acts like an open space, it is ever-changing and often full of movement. Lawns, by contrast, are static. We mow the meadow once a year; the lawn requires considerably more time and gasoline consumption to stay in bounds because it is meant to be more-or-less unchanging.

Except that we live in a meadow. The expensive grass seed loses out to plantain and dandelion, chickweed, henbit, ivies, wild onion, queen-anne’s-lace, cinquefoil and other invaders that thrive on acidic soils that go dry in summer and turn to mud for months, circumstances that the thin-rooted, superficial, stoloniferous lawn-grasses cannot abide for long. I don’t relish the fight against nature, and my suggestion is to “naturalize” our lawn, even though—of course—the majority of these weeds are non-native species. But then, so are the lawn grasses.

I should mention the grazers, as well. Rabbits. Mice and voles that tear  up the root systems of lawn grasses. Deer:

A digression on the subject of deer—

This morning, I was startled by the sight of a large doe skirting the frost-covered goldenrod stalks quite close to the house. It’s deer-hunting season here, and there’s often an increase in the herd activity around our property as individuals and small herds lie low or avoid areas where there are hunters. This is one individual with whom I have long been familiar, a three-legged doe whose territory has included our yard for at least five years.

(In the photo, she is third from the left, the largest one; her right foreleg is missing)

She has borne a fawn every year but this past spring (the year before, she had twins—a male and a female). Some years back, I watched as she delivered her offspring in the meadow, which elicited a poem. In fact, she’s inspired several of my poems, so I owe her a debt of gratitude.

She was back-lighted by the early sun and, as usual, a bit graceless as she ascended the hill on her three good legs. The sun behind her outlined her in white, just as the  dry weeds were also rimmed with white, and she didn’t seem to mind that I had joined her. She just kept going until she vanished into the woodlot. I walked to the bottom of the hill and looked for her tracks in the soft lawn, followed them along the edge of the meadow, three hoof prints instead of four, one a bit deeper in the soil.

Well, we make our compromises, we do what we can with what we have, we choose our battles. My spouse has his lawn, I have my meadow, the doe treads her uneven path through survival at the edge of the suburbs.

I may as well pick up my rake and stop cussing the grass.

On ignorance, mostly

Now I am reading Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, a series of philosophical arguments, dilemmas, extensions and inquiries in small dense type. It requires more concentration than I’ve had to expend on a book in quite some time. So much so that I began to wonder if the reading would ever yield anything valuable enough to have been worth the effort—but I think it is worth the effort. Granted, I am not yet much more than a quarter of the way through its 543 pages (ok, 454 if you don’t include notes, appendices, index); but I’ve reached some discussion about happiness and what can be defined as “good,” and Parfit gets there by means of examining theories of happiness that are directly or indirectly self-defeating. Among other things.

Although Parfit does not mention ignorance, at this section of the book I found myself musing on it, specifically “ignorance is bliss” (a phrase which seems to refute the Socratic statement about the examined life while allowing Socrates his insistence on his own ignorance and, I suppose, his happiness). And having recently read Emma Donoghue’s novel Room, which confronts how much reality is valuable for happiness, under extenuating circumstances, the concept of ignorance as a not-necessarily-negative state of being intrigues me…I, who have tried all my life to avoid ignorance. Though this book is doing a fair job of making me feel pretty ignorant, I don’t feel bad about it.

Am I suggesting ignorance is good? No…but it may be value-neutral, or it may be relative, operating along a sort of continuum that cannot be categorized as “good” or “bad.” I return to my last post, on malclichés. It is possible, even likely, that an instructor who encounters one of these mis-hearings/mis-writings in a student essay will assume the student is ignorant. The student may indeed be ignorant of the conventions of spelling or the usual turns of overused phrases. Such mistakes, however, may indicate a lack of education, simple laziness or disinclination or haste, an over-reliance on AutoCorrect, or perhaps a disability in the areas of vision-hearing-neural processing: not necessarily ignorance.

Then what is ignorance? (This is why so many people get irritated with philosophy: you have to define everything!)

One thing ignorance is not is a lack of conventional education, even though that definition may be the easiest to assume. Again, it’s kind of a continuum, isn’t it? If I miss an allusion to a line in a Yeats poem, am I ignorant? And am I more, or less, ignorant than if I miss an allusion to a Shakespeare play or, perhaps, an allusion to the Kardashian sisters?

(That sentence makes me really want to write a poem that contains references to Yeats, Macbeth, and the Kardashians; but I probably ought to leave that to Billy Collins.)

Anyway, Parfit’s book is really more about what is rationality and what is morality and how individuals may or may not be rational or moral, both as individuals and as persons within communities and societies. Which inquiry and argument, by the way, would encompass Yeats, Shakespeare, and the Kardashians.

Perhaps after I finish reading it, I will be better educated on rationality and morality. I may be just as ignorant, but I’ll try not to be too judgmental about being so.

Here’s one from Philip Larkin, titled (appropriately) “Ignorance”:

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is right, or true, or real
But forced to qualify: Or so I feel
Or: Well, it does seem so,
Someone must know

Strange to be ignorant of the way things work
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed
And willingness to change
Yes, it is strange

Even to wear such knowledge—for our flesh
surrounds us with its own decisions—
and yet spend all our lives on imprecisions,
that when we start to die
have no idea why.

~~~

York (not New York)

I gave a reading Sunday in York, Pennsylvania, one of many small Keystone State cities that hasn’t quite overcome the series of economic and social body-slams it’s experienced in the last several decades. Reading, Pa, which I wrote about in September, made news as “poorest” city; York has to contend with a recent moniker of “murder capitol” of the state. I know a bit about the depressing state of small, dying cities–I live near Allentown, PA and grew up near Camden, NJ. Just to name two…

But back to York.

YorkArts hosts a reading series twice monthly on Sundays at 3 pm. The gallery has a small footprint but big heart, and there was a pleasant crowd of attentive listeners and open-mic participants who respected the time limits and chose good work to share. Many thanks to Jeff, who keeps the space going (and creates art in several forms) and to Barbara DeCesare, a poet and friend who is eight-ways-of-awesome, and this is an understatement. See her website: Barbara DeCesare.

I’m still mulling over my multiple responses to yesterday’s event: depressing town, gorgeous autumn day, connections with old friends and newer friends, thoughts about the poems I heard and the poems I read and the artwork I saw, the daydreaming I did on the long trip there (94 miles) and back, the music I listened to. The apple Carol gave me. The homeless-looking man dragging his cart along Philadelphia Street.

Places like York and Reading and Allentown need the arts desperately, though most of the citizens, business-people, and politicians don’t realize it.

YorkArts on Beaver Street manages to make of itself a beacon for the arts in York. The gallery shows are genuinely fine, and the place sponsors poetry readings. Send them money! Or support a similar organization wherever you’re located. Especially if you’re located in or near a small city that’s fallen on hard times.

That’s my stumping-for-the-arts for this month. Back to poetry, gardens, or philosophy soon.

Close of Day

(I cropped this photo, but it is otherwise straight from the camera–a little Canon OneShot that’s about 8 years old.)

I found myself thinking about the phrase “the close of day.” Te lucis ante terminum, goes a 7th-C. Latin hymn; but I am more inclined to recall Whitman’s “When I Heard at the Close of the Day,” which says:

“When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for me which follow’d…”

No, what brought happiness to our much-plaudited bard was not abstract fame and accolade (claims he) but another day, a day “when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn…”

…a day of anticipation for the visit of his dear friend and lover. A day of happy anticipation, followed by a night of joy. The close of the day closes this sweet and loving poem (written to a man, who “lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,/In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams”).

The Latin hymn invokes Jesus to watch over us as the day closes, and (to me) connotes death as a closing that may occur in the night, just as the bugle call “Taps” has come to signify a death as well as a close of the day’s activities. A childhood bedtime prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

That prayer frightened me a little when I was a child. Like so many people, I feared the night. Yet “close of the day” in Whitman’s poem is a gentle, loving, anticipatory thing, something we need not fear. When I see a sunset like the one above, my sense is more of awe than fear. The day is shutting down, perhaps, but there is no foreboding in the vivid sky, and the moon may be rising or setting and the stars begin to glimmer. Fear is something we name, something we develop in ourselves.

Perhaps we can also develop, in ourselves, a loving anticipation. For the close of day, in particular.

Haiku Break

October blizzard—
along the fence, red rose
in snow.

—I didn’t have my camera with me at the time, so I took the image away by haiku.