Welcome to Nat'l Poetry Month - Part 3

  

Here it comes...the world's
dumbest question.

 
Today as we conclude our meditations occasioned by the arrival of National Poetry Month (NPM), I'd like to ask the world's dumbest question.

It's a question I seldom notice teachers and readers of poetry considering.

In fact, if you go to poets.org, the official home of National Poetry Month, you'll find 17 questions under "What is National Poetry Month?" Yet this question does not appear:

                                    What is poetry?

Lots of people want to appreciate poetry, even write poetry, including my students each fall, but do they have any idea what poetry is? If not, how will they know if they've succeeded?

Of course, we think we know what a poem is. Sorta. And sometimes that might be a problem.

Sloppy Definitions
I'm often told that "poetry is an expression of feeling using heightened language." All right, but how does that distinguish it from some lines in a bathos-filled chick-flick? A paragraph in a novel in which a character rages? Can't prose writing be expressive of feelings and tread the waters of heightened diction? And what about poems that eschew heightened language and are written in plain speech? Is the following not a poem?



So much depends...
upon definitions of poetry.

     so much depends
     upon

      a red wheel
     barrow

      glazed with rain
     water

      beside the white
     chickens.

At this point, the definition-maker usually backs up and states that a poem's words have to be written in shorter lines than prose. The poem's lines don't just wrap around arbitrarily depending on page margins. Instead, the poet deliberately "pauses" or "stops" each line before continuing on to the next. This tends to create a rhythm and emphasis in poems that's different than prose.

And oh yes, they might add, poems, as a rule, are more concise and compressed than their prose cousins.

Hmm. Is this enough? Armed with this information could a visitor from another planet set out to find a poem? Perhaps. The above information at least describes the shape and look of a poem.

Something More
With the above definition of a poem it is as if we've outlined the characteristic curves and smooth texture of a glass wine bottle. Now we can find such a bottle. But there's still one more thing to address.

What is goes in the bottle?

Poetry: It's not about the bottle or the glass, the mere vessel
that contains. What we're interested in is the quality
of the wine...

You see, when it comes to poems, and distinguishing good ones from bad ones, we're not so much interested in the equivalent of the wine bottle (the deliberate use of lines, the concise language, the rhythmic flow) as contents thereof.

Because many of us are thirsty. In our souls. So a perfectly serviceable wine bottle that's either empty or filled with Pepsi or Coke won't do.

All this is to say that what I'm most intent on exploring is what goes inside the bottle of poetry.

What is the magical substance that makes something poetic? What is the mysterious quality in a great poem that causes it to be the word equivalent of wine, that makes it taste good on the tongue and lifts the human spirit?



Where poets hang out

 Ask an Expert
A few years ago I had the opportunity to participate in the annual Squaw Valley Poetry Workshop. About sixty of us had been deemed worthy to hang out in the Sierras above Lake Tahoe in July for five days. All we had to do was each day write a new poem and bring it to class.

A new poem that had to be critiqued by others every day?

Now that was pressure. It's also called the "Squaw Valley method" and is designed to get the creative juices flowing.

A tradition at the workshop is that one of the famous poet-teachers uses Friday afternoon to answer questions placed by students in a box. It sounded like a great opportunity.

I put my little question in the box. By now you can guess what it was.



Robert Hass: Excellent poet, excellent definition of poetry.

 The poet performing Friday services that year happened to be Robert Hass. Hass is one of the most highly esteemed and honored poets in America. A few months after our gathering his latest volume of verse, Time and Materials, would win the Pulitzer Prize.

Hass dug around in the box, looked at a handful of questions, and chose one. It was my question: What is poetry?

For the next 45 minutes he answered it.

It was a very erudite, improvised lecture that started with evidence of Paleolithic humans burial practices in Russia and moved forward in time to give a glimpse of poetry of the future. Hass's point was plain: every generation decides for itself what poetry is.

There is one unifying factor, he said. "Poetry is always the expression of what it's like to be human in an amazing world."

With that, he named for me the wine that goes in the bottle. He gave me a reason to read and try to write poems.

Final Stanza
These days I'm not much worried about the style of a poem or the credentials of the person writing it. What I'm looking for is that recognition the poet's words can give me: Yes! This is what life is like.

The way I look at it, the poem--with its careful choice of words and fine crafting of how the words are arranged--is only a means to an end.

The poem isn't the words.

Instead, the poem is a signpost that points to an experience of life or feeling about life that the poet wants to share with me.

An anonymous poet I ran across recently puts it like this:

     You ask me what
     is a poem.

    The purple dress of the girl at the mall.
    The pink stab of gum on the sidewalk.

     I saw these poems today
     and the crumpled ones in the receipt box

     my father left behind after
     he died on St. Patrick's Day.
    
     What is a poem but a pile of stones,
     each stone a word.

     The stone is rolled into place,
     heaped upon other stones.

     The poem is a marker.
     Some human being stood here.

     Someone felt something, turned eyes
     far away, deep within.

     Then he, then she, walked away
     and now the stones stay

     in the sun, in the rain and at night
     when the stars shine

     and the occasional stone,
     caught up in the gravity of my emotion,

     streaks from the sky,
     burning all the way to the ground

     as I stand here on the grass
     in front of his grave at midnight.

- V.W.

Welcome to Nat'l Poetry Month - Part 2

Twelve of us are sitting in nooks and crannies of a downtown book store on a Thursday evening. The students have notebooks flopped open and are scractching out words between ruled lines.

I'm at a table with a computer and a printer near the front door where the sign at my elbow catches patrons' eyes as they walk in the door.
 "Really? That's cheap." a customer says to me.

"Only one American dollar," I underscore. "All proceeds go to charity. We'll write about anything you want."

 "Something about this weather? My back pains?"

"Sure. You'll get a laser-printed custom-made poem in twenty minutes, a poem that will last a lifetime."

Welcome to Rent-a-Poet, an event I dreamed up for my poetry workshop students. With this exercise we're stretching the city limits of a place called "Creativity" (can we write on demand and under severe time constraints?). At the same time we're putting nice little poems into the pockets of people who a minute ago were totally bereft of such.

Most of all, everyone, including me, is having fun.

This is an odd outcome when one considers I'm the guy who used to absolutely hate poetry.

O' How Poetry Doth Sucketh!
I suppose it began in grade school. The poetry I was exposed to tended to be cobwebbed and not about subject matter I felt drawn to. A poem about a jet pilot or an astronaut? I would have liked that! But no such luck.

Step right up! Get your rhyming words!

And the language was a treacle of old sounding English. While it rolled musically off the tongue, it sounded artificial to me.

As did the end rhyming. What was with all the rhyming? It reminded me of books read to me as a youngster and I was no longer a child.

The last problem was that the poetry was presented by teachers as a sort of mystery we expected to puzzle out.

Here's how it worked:

We would read a poem, barely grasp what it was about. Great! We were present to be educated,were we not? So tediously, line by line, we had to examine individual words and discover half an hour later, "Oh! That's what the poet was saying!"

Who had the patience for such literary games?

Poetry? I loathed it. And that would be my attitude for decades.

The Poetry Pagan Gets Saved
When I went to graduate school I received some bad news. I had been accepted into my MFA program as a promising ficiton writer, but guess what? The curriculum called for all poets to take one fiction workshop and now, too late, I saw it coming: all fiction writers were required to sign up for a semester of poetry workshop.

 What? Me? The person who hates poetry with all the undying effusive, overheated passion of a spewingingly verbose romantic poet? I was going to have to write @#!$%@%*& poems?



Read some books of poetry, try writing some poems
and a person might even end up liking this stuff...

 It was an interesting semester. I discovered, among other things, that I had no idea about the wealth and range of poetry possibilities available to me. It turned out I could write a poem about a jet pilot, if I wanted. And the poem didn't have to rhyme or be written in anything other than the everyday speech that most appealed to me.

The important thing was that my poem move. That it have a sort of rhythm, a burning, palpable urge behind it. That it go somewhere and take me and the reader to some place or angle of life we hadn't seen before.

The best thing, as far as I was concerned, was that a good poem was hard to write. I could revise a single poem upwards of twenty times and it was just starting to sound slightly good...

I liked that challenge. I was the man who hated brussel sprouts, but came to love them, not by eating them (that would happen later), but by being compelled to grow them.

I finally "got" what a poem was all about by being placed inside the finely meshed verbal gears and wheels of one, the one that I wrote myself.

Reading Poetry
It was natural that I started to read some poetry and discover favorite poets. The first was May Swenson. She actually had poems about astronauts!

However, there were many other poets whose work I failed to appreciate. It was too obtuse, cerebral for my taste. One of the poets I studied with in grad school, Edward Hirsch (a poet of luminescent clarity whom I like) wrote a book called How to Read a Poem, and Fall in Love with Poetry. Did I fall in love with poetry? Not quite. I began to like it a great deal. It was more like I was now willing to very selectively date certain poets from time to time, but I would never marry one, if you know what I mean.

But that's the point: a person doesn't have to like all poetry ever written to appreciate the art form and enjoy it from time to time.

Listening to Poetry
Some of the greatest moments of literary pleasure I've ever had were when we had the opportunity to bring major visiting poets come to our campus. There's nothing like hearing poetry well read by its author. This is actually a fairly rare occurence.

 

The incomparable Li-Young Lee
doing his poetry thing...

Not with Li-Young Lee.

No poet reads better and slower than Mr. Young. He goes around the country dazzling audiences with his poems.

Each poem is introduced in a humble, personable way. There's nothing dry or dusty or academic about Mr. Lee. Though today he's a very gentle man, he describes his teenhood as a time when "I wore around my neck dog collar with spikes sticking out" and he was into martial arts.

At our university Li-Young Lee read to an audience of over 400 undergrads. Most of them walked out afterwards saying, "I thought poetry sucked, but I liked that!"

The other poet whose readings are in a class of their own is Galway Kinnell. As one person said of the voice this poet has been endowed with, "Galway could read the phone book and you'd be entranced."

Galway: La voce of poetry...

Kinnell can recite some poems by memory, a rarity these days. His poems "in concert" rumble past--like weather. They are the most intimate human vibrations. You hear him and suddenly you feel more present, more alive.

Galway Kinnell is getting on in years yet he remains another poet quite capable of changing the minds of those who think they hate poetry.

Poems for Sale, Cheap!
So I've come to believe poetry is not so bad. A poem sometimes works to surprise us or call our attention to something we otherwise would miss and a poem can even make us laugh (Billy Collins). That's reason enough to expose more people to poetry by taking it into non-traditional venues.

Just think: What if Wal-mart endorsed poetry and had books of it at every checkout stand? What if you could find poems hanging on hooks for 25 cents each in the bread aisle of the grocery store? What if at the restaurant instead of an after-dinner mint you received a complimentary poem? Or your fortune cookie was stuffed with, yes, a poem?

I think I'm getting carried away. And purists will argue that a poem will never be a retail item. Like buying a loaf of bread, a Coke, a newspaper. There's too much human blood and soul poured into a good poem.

I guess so, but I still like those little one-dollar poems my students wrote when they "rented" out their poetic abilities. The customers seemed so pleased walking away. Sometimes they sought out the student who wrote the poem and thanked them. Sometimes they asked for the student to sign the poem.

And all we're talking about is a few words. Words on the page. But when it works it's like nothing else. - V.W.

Coming: What is poetry anyway?

Welcome to Nat'l Poetry Month - Part 1

Mr. Eliot, and poets like him,
want you to read more poetry...

It would be the easiest thing in the world to write a post today praising how we are are now in the midst of the annual celebration of verse in the U.S.

This is not news. Since 1996 when the American Academy of Poets made its declaration, the arrival of April always brings with it a predictable flurry of bookstore banners and special activities in K-12 classrooms.

April has come and, unlike what T. S. Eliot, said it is not the "cruelest month."

No, April is the most poetic! This is National Poetry Month.

Up With Poetry?
The purpose of NPM is for supporters of poetry to catch the attention of the masses and urge upon them poetry as a public good. The idea is to help people realize that poetry can be sustenance for their overworked, overstressed souls. So appreciate your local poet!

This sounds like a fine idea, but it has to be at least a hundred times harder "sell" than asking people to support teachers, firemen, or cancer survivors.

I mean, poets? What are they good for?

But that's the point. Poets and poetry these days need all the help they can get. Other than a few students and the ultra-refined ladies tea types who show up at occasional readings, does anyone care about poetry anymore? Does anyone think they need to read it?


National Poetry Month promotes the idea that poems are good
for the national health. Pick up a few the next time you're out and about.

The Decline of Poetry 

 It may be hard to believe, but there was a time, just a couple of generations ago, when every school child in America was exposed to lots of poetry. They were even forced to memorize some.

Ask anyone in their 80s or older to recite a poem and you might be surprised to hear a croaky voiced version of Longfellow's "Hiawatha" emerge or Robert Service's "Dan McGrew" or maybe even some Tennyson and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" or Wordsworth's "I wandered as lonely as a cloud..." or a Shakespeare sonnet.

In the old days teachers wore rhyming verse into the grooves of their students' minds.

Then something happened.

Free verse emerged as the dominant style in poetry. Such poems were very hard to memorize and contemporary poets, frankly, weren't always as fun to read as the oldie but goodie romantics who were more interested in love and adventure than anything else.

Then there came the mass distribution of pop music in the form of 45 records and radio which brought to everyone song lyrics in rhyming couplet form that you could memorize in a flash and then sing back to your friends. Who needed poetry? Pop was poetry!

The next place poetry showed up? In hip hop music. Sometimes it was street-wise ugly, but it was all about the words. And the result was plain: You no longer needed to read poetry when you could listen to the words that seemed to speak about your life and it came with a big fat beat.

Enter NPM with its goal of creating demand for the work of traditional and contemporary poets.

A Contrarian View
As a person who enjoys shaking hands with left-handed persons, I'm always interested in a different take on things. Case in point,  poet August Kleinzahler.

A few years ago in the hallowed pages of Poetry magazine, Mr. Kleinzahler excoriated radio personality Garrison Keillor for...well, practically for just being alive and breathing the same air as everyone else on the planet.

Ready to rumble...August Kleinzahler hits Garrison Keillor
right in the baritone bread basket.

Kleinzahler's main target, however, was Keillor's Good Poems anthology which collected in print cherry pickings from his daily five-minute radio show, "The Writer's Almanac." Each morning on the show Mr. Keillor mentions some famous folks' who were born on this day, then reads a poem he's selected for the edification of the masses.

Kleinzahler in his review let the world know that he finds Keillor to be unctuous, preacherly, clueless, and a bad reader to boot. He feels that Keillor is sermonizing for unchallenging poetry as if it will do us all good, sort of like trying to get the public to eat a more heart healthy diet.

"Poetry is not good for you!!" Kleinzahler grumps (paraphrasing): "It exists like fine wine only for the elites who can appreciate it. So give up these misguided crusades to get everyone to like it."

Along the way, Kleinzahler declared that National Poetry Month is simply an advertisement for "a $250 million dollar industry, a rather seamy industry, and an off-shoot of the rather seamy Human Potential Movement industry." 

He said that American poetry, internationally, is regarded as a "joke," the implication being why on earth would we want to dedicate an entire month to reading and promoting more of it?

Ah, but what about the school children? They're the main focus of National Poetry Month as English teachers throughout the land use lesson plans that acquaint students with great poets and even encourage students to write little limericks or haikus.

I think Kleinzahler would say this: "These kids want to listen to hip hop music, so let 'em!" After all, he believes the following:

Ninety percent of adult Americans can pass through this life tolerably well, if not content, eating, defecating, copulating, shopping, working, catching the latest Disney blockbuster, without having a poem read to them by Garrison Keillor or anyone else. Nor will their lives be diminished by not standing in front of a Cézanne at the art museum or listening to a Beethoven piano sonata. Most people have neither the sensitivity, inclination, or training to look or listen meaningfully, nor has the culture encouraged them to, except with the abstract suggestion that such things are good for you. Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not.

Something to Think About
Do we need NPM? I can only say that I used to be a Philistine who hated poetry. All of it. Or at least the little I was acquainted with.

I happened, though, to enjoy seeing a Cezanne in an art museum or listening to a Beethoven piano sonata. I had the "sensitivity" that Mr. Kleinzahler thinks is relatively rare, but I lacked one thing: exposure to the art form (poetry) I thought I deplored.

Was it National Poetry Month that got through to me? Honestly, no, because my conversion to poetry happened a few years before NPM was institutionalized. However, I can only think that NPM can help people like me who perhaps don't know what they're missing. When it puts poetry books on display, holds readings, and yes, teaches young people how to read a poem with enjoyment it's giving a glimpse of otherwise overlooked possibilities.

Will everyone like poetry? No way! But should it be kept in Mr. Kleinzahler's distant hillside caves where only the poetry initiates like himself can sit around by the poetic fires, sipping strong wine, and enjoying their abstruse verse?

I think not. I say poetry no more belongs to Kleinzahler's type of person than the clouds and the birds of the air do. The proles may take poetry and dumb it down to suit their taste (Kleinzahler's main reason for disliking Garrison Keillor), but how does that injure August Kleinzahler up there in his hillside cave?

Or is he worried that down here in National Poetry Land we're actually having more fun than him? - V.W.

COMING: How I Learned to Love instead of Loathe Poetry...

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8 Things to Do (When You're Not Watching Football)

She’s 35 years old, brunette, petite, still maintains the cheerleader figure that belonged to her in high school because five days a week she jogs around the neighborhood. She’s smart, too, has an M.A. in Psych, although at present she’s not a practicing counselor which enables her to stay at home with her three- and five-year-old. 

So how is it an intelligent, fit woman finds herself bumping around the house like some kind of displaced person, just her and the kids, for great swaths of Sunday and Saturday afternoons and into the evening? How is it when she relates to her man during these times she’s like some throwback version of ultra feminine person, walking on soft feet and bringing to him in the Royal TV Den a refilled bowl of chips or a fresh foamy beer, all of it presented with a lovely smile which he doesn't even notice?

The explanation is simple. It’s football season. She’s become a Football Widow.



Hut! Hut! - Game Day 

And throughout the house there resounds from time to time the husband’s guttural outbursts of Yes! and Man! and Stinking, lousy! and Oh my I don’t believe this! and Did you see that? and Hurry up with the replay! and Just throw it! and Not up the middle again! and Go for it! Go for it!

How did she not notice before the wedding?

It’s not like she doesn’t understand football. When she was a cheerleader she dated a nickelback. (Of course, the guy had great hands, but his kissing? Left something to be desired.) Then she met her beloved. She knew he liked football, but something happened after they got married and bought the 52-inch screen.

He pats the couch space beside him and invites her to join in, but she just can’t do it. She understands his desire to see 22-men at a time strive for perfection as they struggle mightily against gravity and their own and other bodies and they collide at high speed and also there's the drama of not knowing how it will turn out.

For sixty minutes each game is so much more a heightened reality than anything he experiences at his dull place of work. Still, how many times can you watch it?

I Go Over to the Other Side

This season, as a result of being Van Winkled, I’ve joined the Football Widows. My project compels me to make do without the NCAA or NFL until we reach the great end zone of Super Bowl on February 6, 2011 and then, mercifully, it will all be over.

So I’m learning some of what the Football Widows do on game day.

1 - Hang out with other women in the kitchen and make snacks for the men.

2 - Deliver snacks, return to kitchen, eat some of the snacks themselves.

3 - Talk to other women about diets.

4 - Depressed, change subject to the kids, then how much the men watch football.

5 - Go shopping together (this is another way football is good for the economy).

6 - Come home, talk about what they bought, talk about the kids and how they hope the boys don’t grow up to watch as much football as their dads and how they hope the girls don’t marry someone who watches as much football as their dad.

7 - Clean up the TV room which now looks like an apocalypse of beer bottles, beer cans, pretzel crumbs, spilled chips, every surface well salted.

This routine is about as expected and formal as the refs in striped shirts, the chain markers, the goal posts, and the big men lining up in formation. That’s why it occurred to me to shake things up a little

One More Thing To Try

Here's the thing: gender need not keep one out of the game. The Football Widows can create their own powerful collisions, their own moments of unexpected grace when arms reach in and haul in the precious prize, or racing heartbeats lead one past obstacles into the brighter light. No need to put on pads and helmets. The women can go into the living room and read poetry together.

What did I just say?

Yes, this is a radical response. Bringing up the subject of poetry is like going for it and throwing a bomb on fourth down and long at your own twenty-yard line. It’s like putting in the third string quarterback. It's like trying for a 70-yard field goal. It’s like—Well, perhaps you know what I mean. Who in America reads poetry anymore?

I for one and I think I have some pretty good reasons to do so, too.

That's why for one moment I'd like to consider a certain short poem and what it might do for the Football Widows. It’s by the late James Wright.

Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,

Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,

Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October,

And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

What amazes me about Wright’s poem is its brevity. It’s only 73 words long, yet I feel like I know his people, their dreams and their sorrows. Wright accomplishes this through the use of a part of speech that can prove disastrous in less talented hands: adjectives.

But there’s no piling up flowery descriptors here. Wright’s an emotional poet, not a sentimental one. Each adjective is designed to shape the rough noun it modifies until it becomes three dimensional to us.

I notice how Wright adds a "ruptured" to "night watchman" so it's no longer just some man. I'm looking at a stooped figure who has had more than his share of losses, physical and spiritual. His being "ruptured" even as he seeks solace at the football game moves me. A similar effect is achieved by the application of adjectives elsewhere: long (beers), gray (faces), proud (fathers), starved (pullets), and (beautiful).

And there’s that wonderful adverb in the last line.

Terribly.

Was James Wright a football fan or was he on the side of the Football Widows? I’d love to hear my collection of Football Widows discuss that. And maybe after that we could read a lovely nature poem by Mary Oliver. Then it would be halftime. We could drift back into the kitchen. You know, I’m not adverse to those little meatballs with toothpicks poking through them. The longer I live, the more I realize--poetry can take on many forms. Who made those anyway? The cheerleader? Does she have a recipe she can give me? Oh, that would be great! Give me a pen, I'll write it down. - V.W.

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