Thoughts on Poetry

RHYS BOWEN : I love the book Possession by Byatt, don’t you? It’s an absolute tour de force, especially the way she has created a whole body of poetry for two fictitious poets in the style of Tennyson and Christina Rosetti.

 Back in the day poetry was a big thing. There were court poets in the Middle Ages who lived well thanks to rich patrons. Homer was a celebrity. Everyone knew Keats and Shelley and Lord Byron. And Tennyson –he was even made a lord for his poetry. And Longfellow. So what has happened to us today? Why have we lost our love of poetry? The closest we have to poet celebrities is Leonard Cohen, who set his poems to music, perhaps Mary Oliver, although I doubt the average person has heard of her.

 We no longer value poetry, do we?. A poet can certainly not make a good living. Nobody goes to college and says “I’m going to be a poet,” without their parents tearing their hair out.

Why is this, I wonder.

 Maybe it’s because poetry was designed to be spoken aloud, and modern poets try to be too clever and esoteric:

 Stars at night

Falling. Boom. Crash. Thud.

Like stricken bodies

Into my tea cup

Why?

 (that’s not a real poem. I just made it up, but you get the gist) It creates an idea, a picture, a fleeting thought, but then it’s gone.

How many of us had to learn poems by heart in school?

 On either side the rive lie

Fields of barley and of rye

That clothe the world and meet the sky

And all the day the folk go by

To many towered Camelot…. 

 I can still recite so many of them: The Ancient Mariner, Hiawatha, The Forsaken Merman, lots of Robert Louis Stevenson and of course Shakespeare.

And do you know what? They all rhymed. They were all easy and fun to speak out loud.

 That is what we’ve lost. My great aunts used to recite poetry during evening soirees. So we’ve lost the occasions to do this. And perhaps the poets are still here, but they’ve put their poetry to music: Bob Dylan, Lennon and McCartney, Steven Sondheim…

 I don't think children learn poetry in school and longer. Only English majors will ever discover Keats, or Longfellow. Children will never sit in the back of cars chanting:

 Faster than fairies faster than witches,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches,

Riding along like troops in a battle

All through the meadows, the horses and cattle…

 I loved it. I miss it.  I’d be a poet if I could make a living at it. My mother tells me that I wrote my first poem at 4.

I used to write lots of poetry in my teens. I'd sit in a darkened room, put a Tchaikovsky record on the radiogram and let my heart outpour. Come to think of it, many of them didn't rhyme either: But some did:

Sit, a stone, and survey

Until love and life pass away

Rest, a rock on the shore,

Until faith and death 

are no more.

Then, as a new moon, alone

Arise and face the unknown.

They were all pretty bleak and sad at that time, I think. i was a huge fan of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

So share your thoughts, dear Reds

Do you miss poetry? Did you have to learn it? Did you ever write any. What can we do to bring it back

HALLIE EPHRON: Goodness yes, I had to memorize poems in elementary school. Remember “Barare Frietchie?” (“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,/

But spare your country’s flag,” she said.) “Evangeline.” (“This the forest primeval…)

And then the ones I memorized just because I read them so many times and liked the way they sounded. (e. e. Cummings -anyone lived in a pretty how town. / (with up so floating many bells down)...

That’s the thing about poetry - so much of it is meant to be spoken and listened to. Though I confess a lot of poetry leaves me scratching my head and wondering what I’m missing. Is it ok to say that?  

JENN McKINLAY: I love poetry! WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS was published when I was a kid and I memorized so many Shel Silverstein poems. They were charming and clever and just delightful. Also, I grew up in New England so memorizing Emily Dickinson felt like a requirement.

I do believe poetry is alive and well in the younger generations. My nephew is a poet and writes and performs in poetry slams in local Boston coffee shops. When I was a teen librarian we hosted slams for teens by an outfit called Phonetic Spit. Some of the poems were angry, others broke your heart, and a few really made you think but the best part was that it was all written and performed by teens who’d discovered the use of poetry to deal with life’s joys and sorrows and it was wonderful. Also, we have Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb bringing poetry to a new generation, which is terrific. I think poetry, like music, has changed in tone and style over time but it’s still there and it’s still relevant and I don’t believe it will ever disappear completely. 

LUCY BURDETTE: I’m always envious of fiction writers that began as poets because I feel they have a better grasp of how to use language beautifully. My prose is more workmanlike than poetic. However, I will share something that makes me laugh when I think about it. I set my second book, DEATH IN FOUR COURSES, at a conference for food writers and one of the characters was a “culinary poet.” After the victim is found, they have a small wake-ish event and the poet is called upon to read. I had such fun writing this:

Fritz pushed his glasses to his forehead, unfolded a half sheet of lined paper, and smoothed it on the podium. He studied his audience with pale blue eyes, then turned his attention to the paper.

“The Butcher,” he said. “A poem to honor Jonah Barrows.”

 “Morning comes, the butcher’s wife hands him an apron, starched white.

Keep it clean, she says.

At night, he brings it home, layered with the detritus of his day.

A splash of blood from the rib eye steaks carved for the rich man on the hill.

A touch of green from lobsters cracked and cleaned for the fussy housewife,

Who will eat pink flesh but not green, no matter how good it tastes.

Marrow from hacked bones,

Distributed to fancy restaurants and slathering dogs alike.

And as the day goes by, the hues of the apron morph from red to gray.

I tried, he says, handing it to the missus come evening. I had to do my work.”

RHYS: I love this, Lucy!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Rhys, I adored Possession. I read it in one sitting–literally, on a ten-hour London to Dallas flight–and was just blown away. It definitely influenced me to write Dreaming of the Bones (in which I, like Lucy above, included poetry.) It was poetry that started me writing as a teen, in fact, and I read a lot. e.e. cummings, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound (why, I ask now!), Auden, Plath, Stevie Smith, Anne Sexton, Larkin, Wallace Stevens. And of course my beloved Dylan Thomas. I was never as good at memorizing, however, except for William Blake, who is forever engraved in my brain!

I hope poetry isn't lost! I think that exposure to language opens pathways in the brain that otherwise don't develop, and that makes our lives and our thinking so much richer and more nuanced. 

You've encouraged me to get back to my "poem a day" practice!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Yes, I have a poem a day, too! I’m Yeats, Auden, Wallace Stevens. I had the honor of reading Czieslaw Milosz’s “On Angels” at my father's funeral, and highly recommend it as a source of peace and inspiration and wonder.  And, with a name like mine, I constantly think of Robert Frost's “Maple,” which begins sweetly, about a girl named Maple who everyone thinks is “Mabel,” and her search for her mother’s meaning in naming her before she died in childbirth,  and ends with a bitter twist.  

Thus had a name with meaning, given in death,

Made a girl's marriage, and ruled in her life.

No matter that the meaning was not clear.

A name with meaning could bring up a child,

Taking the child out of the parents' hands.

Better a meaningless name, I should say,

As leaving more to nature and happy chance.

Name children some names and see what you do.

(Maybe we should all remember this when we name our characters…)

RHYS: So who are your favorite poets?  I still adore Robert Frost, Auden, Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver, Keats...