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?

Lucy Welcomes Her Cousin Tom for Limerick Mania!

Cousin Tom, Sister Sue, Cousin Joan

LUCY BURDETTE: As I mentioned on Monday, my cousin Tom is a limerick genius. (In photo to left, they must be laughing at one of his wondrous poems!) He also works as a professor at a school in NC--I won't say more as he thought they might not appreciate this kind of publicity. Lucky for all of us, he's agreed to help us get started on JRW limerick mania. Thanks for agreeing to visit, Tom! Is there a certain structure that the limerick should follow?

TOM ISLEIB: Generally, a limerick has five lines with syllable content and rhyme scheme 8a, 8a, 5b, 5b, 8a.  If you read a lot of limericks, you will find that there is some variation in the numbers of syllables in lines, usually within one or two of the eight or five.  As for the rhyming, I have seen some real stretches, and I think it unsporting when the fifth line simply repeats the last word of the first or second line, e.g., one attributed to Rudyard Kipling:

"There was a small boy of Quebec
Who was buried in snow to his neck. 
When they said, "Are you friz?" 
He replied, "Yes, I is,
But we don't call THIS cold in Quebec." 

I imagine that Kipling would punch me out for calling that "unsporting." 

LUCY: When you, Tom, are beginning a poem, how do you start? With the important rhyming words for lines 1, 2, and 5, or somewhere else?

TOM:  I usually start with a word that is critical to the particular limerick, say, a name, and try to think of words that rhyme with it that could end lines 1, 2, and 5.  Some names are hard to rhyme, for example, "Martha" (my newly married cousin) although the shortened version "Mart" or "Marty" is easier.  If a critical word is difficult to rhyme, you can bury it within a line that ends with a more easily rhymed word, e.g.,

"When Martha was going to be wed
She asked, "Will it go to my head? 
I caught me a mister
Then gloated to Sister. 
Should I have just shacked up instead?" 

LUCY: Any other tips for limerick novices?

TOM:  A memorable limerick is off-color, some of them downright nasty dirty.  We all know the famous dirty one about the man from Nantucket, although I have heard a perfectly clean version of that one.  "There once was a man from Nantucket who kept all his cash in a bucket..."  If not off-color, a limerick usually has a pun, a joke, or some other cleverness built into it that makes the reader groan.  Consider Mark Twain's famous one: 

"A man hired by John Smith and Co.
Loudly declared that he’d tho.
Men that he saw
Dumping dirt near his door
The drivers, therefore, didn’t do." **

See how he did that?  Jot down your first try, then let it fester in your subconscious mind for a day or two.  You may come up with a better variation or rhyme if you do.

LUCY: And ps, in case you think my cuz can’t take a harder name like “Martha” and do something with it, here’s the limerick he dashed off just before the wedding:

“There once was a woman named Martha
Who was hunting a guy like Siddhartha,
And then she met Rich,
A nice sonofabitch,
Now they'll marry and snooze by the heartha.”

And in case (like me) you didn’t get Mark Twain’s cleverness, here’s the key:
Co. = Company
Tho. = Thump any
Do. = Dump any

Now for the contest…come up with your best shot at a limerick and post in the comments. There’ll be prizes, and celebration for your daring, I guarantee you!

Joining the Dead Poet's Society

RHYS BOWEN: I've just had a week of family togetherness--children, spouses, grandchildren and a lot of singing, laughing and reminiscing. I expressed surprise that the children didn't know any Christmas carols by heart, and then, when the discussion turned to learning by heart I was dismayed to find that children are not required to learn any poetry by heart in school these days. Learning poems and reciting them in front of the class was a part of English lessons that I relished. I'm sure my love of words was fostered by the wealth of poetry we had to learn: I can still say the whole of Matthew Arnold's The Forsaken Merman by heart. I still get chills when I recite "The Listeners." I still get teary eyed at Keat's "When I have fears that I shall cease to be," and am moved by Gerard Manley Hopkins's "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day."

And then there are the Shakespeare sonnets. "Golden lads and girls all must, like chimney sweepers, come to dust."
And Robert Frost:
I will be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence.
Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference."

Walt Whitman and Longfellow, Kublai Khan and The Lady of Shalot--they all still linger somewhere in the back of my memory, to be called upon when needed.

Learning these poems not only gave me a love for the power of words to evoke images and emotions, but reciting them in front of other people gave me the tools I use all the time today for public speaking. My grandparents, in the days before radio and TV, learned to recite long poems and dramatic scenes to entertain each other on long winter evenings. My great aunt could recite the whole of her favorite Shakespeare plays.
And now this seems to be a lost art form.

So dear Reds: did you have to learn poetry? Which poems moved you and inspired you? Which could you still recite today?

HALLIE EPHRON: I did have to learn poetry. Annabelle Lee. And Evangeline. Barbara Fritchie. When lilacs Last by the dooryard bloomed... But the ones I remember are the ones my mother read to me. And so funny that you should post about this, Rhys, because having our grandbaby visiting this holiday had me scurrying about to find our book of children's poems with my mother's favorites. Wynken, Blynken and Nod (Eugene Field).  The Owl and the Pussycat (Edward Lear). And of course all of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas (Clement Clarke Moore). Language is a lovely thing.

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Yes, had to learn poetry in school and recite it. One poem was Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper" — which came back in a flood when I took a train through the highlands of Scotland! Another was Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day." I'm also pretty good at remembering odd verses and couplets — they pop unbidden into my mind at odd times and are very much with me. One poem that's been on my mind a lot, especially as I write about war and conflict is Shakespeare's Sonnet 95, "They That Have the Power to Hurt and Will Do None":

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

LUCY BURDETTE: No, don't remember having to memorize or recite poetry in school but it seems like a good idea! We had A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES on our bookshelf, and my parents read to us a lot. Oh, and do you remember the poetry about the GOOPS by Gelett Burgess? Loved those!

The  Goops they lick their fingers,
And the Goops they lick their knives;
They spill their broth on the tablecloth--
Oh, they lead disgusting lives!

And the book had the cutest illustrations too!

The Goops they have no manners
The Goops

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I can't recall if memorization was required, but I definitely socked a lot of poetry (and Shakespeare) away in my youth. I can pull up quotes and stanzas from any number of poets, although the number of poems I can recite from start to finish seems to be limited to silly stuff like "The Jaberwocky" or ones that have been set to music, like "My Luv is Like a Red, Red Rose." Speaking of Scottish verse, I can deliver the whole of Walter Scott's "Lochinvar" at a gallop. Great for entertaining youngsters.

Parochial schools are the only ones that seem to be doing old-fashioned things like memorization and cursive writing. My two oldest both had to memorize "Paul Revere's Ride" by Portland native Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (They also both visited Longfellow's house in Portland, which is a fascinating slice of mid-19th century Americana.)

I love having some poetry at hand, if only because when I see lilacs it reminds me of Whitman and then I can dive into his poems again.

RHYS: Julia, you live close enough to Robert Frost's farm. I did the poetry walk there once. So moving.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  OH, I wish I remembered more! We were supposed to memorize, but as a self-styled rebellious student, when I was told to memorize 100 lines of Shakespeare, for instance, I remember thinking I'd simply memorize 100 separate lines, clever me. So I had "what, you egg, young fry of treachery!" and 99 more. I finally realized it would be better to do actual soliloquies, so for a long time I had "What a piece of work is man" and  of course "To be or not to be."   I still can do Frost's  Stopping By Woods and The Road Not Taken (which is so much more poignant now than when I was 13), and Poe's The Bells and the Spoon River poems,

Then, in college, I got SO serious.
Shelley:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

And Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

And Auden:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

I got happier as years went by.

 But there's nothing more wonderful, I have to say, than hearing my two grandsons (6 and 12) recite, perfectly and with MUCH drama, the entire Jabberwocky. It was amazing!  I am teaching them James James Morrison Morrison.

RHYS: It's strange that you should mention James James, Hank, as I just read Louise Penny's January newsletter (go read it on her website, it's amazing. http://ukimages.gmimage3.com/new/viewnewsletter2.aspx…

One can see why she's a best-selling author, as well as a very dear friend!) Louise talks about A.A. Milne instilling in her a love of words and poetry.

Then of course I realized this was absolutely the same for me. Those poems were at the heart of my childhood. James James and They're Changing Guard at Buckingham Palace. All fabulous to recite out loud. Make sure your kids and grandchildren learn them!

On Writing Haiku by SJ Rozan

Gulls sit on pilings 

While starlings sweep, race, land, peck,  

Eating all the moss.

 SJ ROZAN: Every Saturday morning for the last ten years or so I've written three haiku.  If I'm in New York I go to the Hudson, two blocks from my apartment.  If I'm elsewhere, I try to find a body of water, or a park, a yard, someplace quiet, though I've written my Saturday haiku in planes, on trains, and in hotel rooms.

Haiku, as I'm sure you know, is a three-line, 17-syllable poetry form, in the pattern 5-7-5.  Each line is expected to be a phrase; not necessarily a full sentence, but a concept that's understandable without the next line.  If the last line can deliver a small twist, all the better, though that's not required.

Those are the English rules; the Japanese scanning rules are a little different, dealing not in syllables but in on, which are analogous but not the same.  Since I don't speak Japanese, though, and certainly don't write in it, this post will stick to English.

Haiku derives from an older form, called hokku, also of 17 on, which was written as the opening stanza of a specific type of longer work called a renga.  By the 17th C.  hokku were being written to stand alone.  The independent hokku were renamed haiku and voila! -- a form was born.

As the haiku became standardized it was generally accepted that as far as content, each poem should freeze a moment of time in the natural world.

Orange-legged mallard 

Busily grooms her feathers 

While floating backwards.

Because our surroundings are not necessarily the natural world, though, city haiku are also written.

Building skeleton
Engulfed by rising tide of
Gold insulation.

17-syllable, 5-7-5 poems that freeze a moment in human nature, not the world around us, are perfectly permissible, and called senryu.

Standing in the rain
Drinking tea, watching ducks float.
What an idiot. 
Abstraction is not welcome in either the haiku or the senryu, nor is generalizing from the particular, at least, not by the poet.  That's left to the readers.

Why do I write them?  The requirement to be specific and of the moment is of endless value to writers.  It's the meaning of "show, don't tell."  Doing haiku every week keeps me on that narrow path of specificity that's so easy to stray from.

The above haiku and senryu were all mine.   Some of them, and many more, appear in my e-book, 211 Haiku.  If you like them, here's the link. 

That's pretty much all there is to it.  If you want to try it, that's all you need to know.  Enjoy!SJ Rozan, a native New Yorker, is the author of fourteen novels, under her own name and, with a co-writer, under a new secret identity as Sam Cabot.  She's won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, and many other awards.  Her latest book is Sam Cabot's BLOOD OF THE LAMB. 

And there are two prizes today for folks brave enough to try their hand at a haiku. These will be chosen strictly by random drawing--no judging of merit! Simply post your poem in the comments...