Thoughts on Poetry

RHYS BOWEN: The death of Mary Oliver a few weeks ago started me thinking about poets and poetry. Poetry is something that is no longer part of our lives. If you asked a member of the younger generation to recite a poem, or even to name a living poet, they would not be able to do so.
And yet the other day something nearly fell off my balcony. I reached to grab it and turned to John saying, "Quick as it fell from it's broken staff, Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf."
"What?" he said, looking at me as if I'd gone gaga.
"Barbara Frietchie," I said. "Whittier."
He still looked puzzled.
"Don't you remember, "Up from the meadows rich with corn, Clear in the cool September morn..."
He had no idea what I was talking about and I realized that I could pretty much still recite all of that poem I learned in grade school.

Learning poetry by heart was a requirement in many of my English classes. I can still do Haiawatha, The Lady of Shallot, The Forsaken Merman, and many more.
There is a certain joy and satisfaction that comes from reciting poetry, borne along by the rhythm... Half a league, half a league, half a league onward. Into the field of death rode the six hundred."

So I wonder why we no longer enjoy and treasure poetry. Is it because our modern poems don't rhyme, aren't fun to recite? Or maybe many would-be poets are now song writers. Certainly many of the Beatles songs could be considered fine poetry.  And one has to admit that nobody gets rich from writing poetry!

Or is it just that we no longer have a need for it?  At the time of Tennyson poets were rock stars, revered, given knighthoods. I surmise that this was because there was no evening entertainment unless people entertained each other: learning and reciting poetry was a required asset for any young person. At a gathering they would be called upon to present their party piece. My great aunt Sarah (called Min by the family--yes we all have silly nicknames) could recite endless amounts of poetry, a lot of it dramatic and sad about poor children dying in their parents' arms and going to heaven. 

Poetry like that also took the place of history lessons. The Charge of the Light Brigade tells of the hopeless battle in Crimea. Ordinary people would not have known about it otherwise. It extols great deeds: How Horatio Held the Bridge. Of course, Shakespeare's works are all written in verse!

In the 1900s Rousseau and others theorized that humans could sing before speech evolved. Poetry was our natural means of communication. And now we have lost it. It seems we have reached a peak of language skills only to lose them again. CU later. Heart. Happy face.

One of the memorable moments of my life was walking around Robert Frost's farm with my friends, taking turns to read aloud the poems attached to different parts of the farm: the Woodpile, the swing, The Woods.... I still get chills thinking about it now. (Pic Tamra Bolton)

So Mary Oliver's death was particularly poignant to me as she is one of the few modern poets who actually spoke to me. The other was Leonard Cohen:
There is a Crack in Everything
That's How the Light Gets In.

Brilliant!
And Mary Oliver somehow touches a nerve

So dear Reds: Do you feel the loss of poetry? Did you have to learn poems when you were young? Can you still recite them?

HALLIE EPHRON: I had to memorize a ton of poems in school. Yes, Barbara Frietchie. Evangeline. My mother was a writer and had been an English major. She'd recite poetry at the dinner table, and as a result I know an odd assortment of poems from beginning to end ("Richard Corey," "The Congo," "Crossing the Bar." We had a massive two-volume set of poetry (British poets in one volume, America in the other) at home that I worked my way through, reading aloud to myself. I loved Edna Millay's poems ("My candle burns at both ends/It will not last the night.") And e. e. cummings ("Anyone lived in a pretty how town (with upso floating many bells down" )") Of course, Poe's tintinnabulating bells bells bells and raven quothing.

And I love to read poems to my grandkids, though they still need pictures to be truly interested. Shel Silverstein's are short and funny and well illustrated. Mother Goose. Dr. Seuss.

JENN McKINLAY: I didn't have to memorize poetry in school, but my mother was a librarian so we had to memorize it for her. I can still trot out Robert Frost's "The Road not Taken" or a dozen or so gems from Shel Silverstein, the poet of my childhood. My personal favorite is Dickinson's "Hope" is the thing with feathers, which I made the Hooligans memorize when they were young. But they've introduced me to some powerful poets in the guise of rap. There is one in particular, NF, that left me breathless with his word us in the song Mansion, which I would argue could be considered poetry. Example:
"Broken legs but I chase perfection
These walls are my blank expression
My mind is a home I'm trapped in
And it's lonely inside this mansion."
I think poetry will make a comeback, like all the art forms do, but maybe it already is in the young voices like NF, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, and Donald Glover who are using rap/poetry/spoken word in new and different ways to reach their generation.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Rhys, Mary Oliver's death has had me thinking a lot about poetry, too. I can't think of a modern poet who has reached so many people. I'm envious of your poetry rich upbringing, and of your memorization skills!

But while I don't remember my parents reading any poetry, I both read and wrote poetry from my teens at least into my thirties. I even slogged my way through Ezra Pound, which now astounds me. Then the novels seem to have overtaken my brain space, alas. Every year I vow to make more effort to read--and to reread--poetry--maybe this year I'll actually succeed! The first poem I memorized in my teens that still sticks is William Blake's Tyger, Tyger:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 
In the forests of the night; 
What immortal hand or eye, 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 

I can recite big chunks of Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales (my all time favorite, I think), some glorious Auden, and of course, Goodnight Moon.

(RHYS: Debs, I always think of the thing we used to say in school Tiger, Tiger burning bright--however did you catch alight?)

LUCY BURDETTE: I'm envious of all that childhood training too! We had a copy of THE CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES in the house and my father liked to recite "Under the spreading chestnut tree, a village smithy stands..." and so on. But that was about it. I know more poetry would help my writing and my mind, but I have trouble fitting it all in! Except that when it rains, John recites Paul Verlaine to me:  Il pleure dans mon coeur, Comme il pleut sur la ville; Quelle est cette langueur. Qui pénètre mon coeur?

And that means roughly, it rains in my heart like it rains over the village. What is this melancholy that penetrates my heart?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, sure, we had to do it--got to do it, I suppose. I  loved. it Frost ,and Shakespeare, and Yeats, and Auden. I remember a big wonderful discussion we had about Auden's heartbreaking September 1,1939. The first version of the poem ends: We must love one another, or die. But later, Auden rejected that, and refused to have that stanza published..finally, he relented, but only if it were changed to: We must love one another, and die. How different those are! And I thank my dear English teacher, Mr. Thornburg, for a discussion I will never forget.

When my father died a few years ago, I was asked to read a poem at his funeral. (Yikes, huh? Very high degree of difficulty.) I chose one I knew he loved, and I love too. Milosz's On Angels. I bet I could recite the whole thing, now, but it ends with a musing on the voice of what the author believes might as well be angels:

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draws near
another one
do what you can.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I love poetry. I can't recall if I was required to memorize when I was in school, or if I just did, but I know many sing-sing types of poems (Young Lochinvar, The Walrus and the Carpenter, Te Song of Wandering Aengus) by heart, and I can quote snatches of other poems all day long, including, "'Shoot i you must, this old gray head/But spare your country's flag!' she said." Rhys, I'm impressed you were taught Barbara Fritchie, as it's such an American moment!

My girls aren't much for poetry, but the Sailor loves it, and started writing poetry in middle school. When he was 14 or so, he began attending poetry slams in Portland, reading his verse aloud. It thrills me that it continues to be a part of his creative life.

I can't claim to have a favorite poem because it changes with the day and my mood, but Yeats has been meaningful to me lately:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep...

RHYS: So, dear friends. Thoughts on poetry. Do you still read it ? Does it mean a lot to you? Do you ever recite it out loud?

"Oh, Kaye!" chats about poetry

I often turn to poetry when I can't seem to find the right book for the right moment.  Poetry seems to fill the gaps between books for me.

It can be fun and whimsical.

Or, speak to a darker mood.

It's for that reason, I often turn to poetry during tough times.

I have found myself turning to it more lately than usual.

And because April is National Poetry Month, I thought I'd share a few of my favorites with you.

For My Grandmother’s Perfume, Norell 

Because your generation didn’t wear perfume

           but chose a scent—a signature—every day

                      you spritzed a powerhouse floral with top

                                 notes of lavender and mandarin, a loud

smell one part Doris Day, that girl-next-door

           who used Technicolor to find a way to laugh about

                      husbands screwing their secretaries over lunch,

                                 the rest all Faye Dunaway, all high drama

extensions of nails and lashes, your hair a

           a breezy fall of bangs, a stiletto entrance

                      that knew to walk sideways, hip first:

                                 now watch a real lady descend the stairs.

Launched in 1968, Norell

           was the 1950s tingling with the beginning

                      of Disco; Norell was a housewife tired of gospel,

                                 mopping her house to Stevie Wonder instead.

You wore so much of it, tiny pockets

           of your ghost lingered hours after you

                      were gone, and last month, I stalked

                                 a woman wearing your scent through

the grocery so long I abandoned

           my cart and went home. Fanny, tell me:

                      How can manufactured particles carry you

                                 through the air? I always express what I see,

but it was no photo that

           stopped and queased me to my knees.

After all these years, you were an invisible

           trace, and in front of a tower of soup cans

                      I was a simple animal craving the deep memory

                                 worn by a stranger oblivious of me. If I had courage,

the kind of fool I’d like to be,

           I would have pressed my face to her small

                      shoulder, and with the sheer work of

                                 two pink lungs, I would have breathed

enough to

           conjure

                      you back

                                 to me.

-- Nickole Brown

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

A passion to make, and make again
where such un-making reigns.

—Adrienne Rich

The Country

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time—

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

- - Billy Collins

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be

The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

—Wallace Stevens

Fictional Characters 

Do they ever want to escape?
Climb out of the white pages
and enter our world?

Holden Caulfield slipping in the movie theater
to catch the two o'clock
Anna Karenina sitting in a diner,
reading the paper as the waitress
serves up a cheeseburger.

Even Hector, on break from the Iliad,
takes a stroll through the park,
admires the tulips.

Maybe they grew tired
of the author's mind,
all its twists and turns.

Or were finally weary
of stumbling around Pamplona,
a bottle in each fist,
eating lotuses on the banks of the Nile.

For others, it was just too hot
in the small California town
where they'd been written into
a lifetime of plowing fields.

Whatever the reason,
here they are, roaming the city streets
rain falling on their phantasmal shoulders.

Wouldn't you, if you could?
Step out of your own story,
to lean against a doorway
of the Five & Dime, sipping your coffee,

your life, somewhere far behind you,
all its heat and toil nothing but a tale
resting in the hands of a stranger,
the sidewalk ahead wet and glistening.

by Danusha Laméris

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? 
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free?  Not me?
Surely not me?  The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

 - Langston Hughes

New Year Poem 

Let us step outside for a moment
As the sun breaks through clouds
And shines on wet new fallen snow,
And breathe the new air.
So much has died that had to die this year.

We are dying away from things.
It is a necessity—we have to do it
Or we shall be buried under the magazines,
The too many clothes, the too much food.
We have dragged it all around
Like dung beetles
Who drag piles of dung
Behind them on which to feed,
In which to lay their eggs.

Let us step outside for a moment
Among ocean, clouds, a white field,
Islands floating in the distance.
They have always been there.
But we have not been there.

We are going to drive slowly
And see the small poor farms,
The lovely shapes of leafless trees
Their shadows blue on the snow.
We are going to learn the sharp edge
Of perception after a day’s fast.

There is nothing to fear.
About this revolution…
Though it will change our minds.
Aggression, violence, machismo
Are fading from us
Like old photographs
Faintly ridiculous
(Did a man actually step like a goose
To instill fear?
Does a boy have to kill
To become a man?)

Already there are signs.
Young people plant gardens.
Fathers change their babies’ diapers
And are learning to cook.

Let us step outside for a moment.
It is all there
Only we have been slow to arrive
At a way of seeing it.
Unless the gentle inherit the earth
There will be no earth.

- - May Sarton

Windchime

She goes out to hang the windchime

in her nightie and her work boots.

It’s six-thirty in the morning

and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest

tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,

windchime in her left hand,

hammer in her right, the nail

gripped tight between her teeth

but nothing happens next because

she’s trying to figure out

how to switch #1 with #3.

She must have been standing in the kitchen,

coffee in her hand, asleep,

when she heard it—the wind blowing

through the sound the windchime

wasn’t making

because it wasn’t there.

No one, including me, especially anymore believes

till death do us part,

but I can see what I would miss in leaving—

the way her ankles go into the work boots

as she stands upon the ice chest;

the problem scrunched into her forehead;

the little kissable mouth

with the nail in it.

- - Tony Hoagland

How 'bout you, Dear Reds, are you poetry readers?

Or poetry writers?

Do you turn to poetry at any particular time,

for any particular reason?

Do you have a favorite poem

 or two you'd care to share?