Poetry

[Bubbler]

Are there forms of art you appreciate, but can't get into? Mine is poetry.

I was watching the American Experience on Walt Whitman tonight. I have an appreciation for what Whitman means to our culture, I understand how historically relevant he is, and God knows I could never write like him.

But that's just it ... I don't want to ever write like him. He might not have seemed purple prose-ish in his time, but by God does he ever now. All poetry, no matter what form, no matter whether it's traditional poetry form or stream of consciousness, just doesn't interest me at all. In fact, it bores me to tears. Yet, I appreciate it for the talent it takes to do it.

It's kind of like golf, I appreciate the hell out of the sport and those who play it, but I rarely watch it.

It's weird because I'm as pretentious as it gets with other art forms. I love film, art and music that challenges you intellectually in the same way good poetry does. I love great songwriters, playwrights and screenwriters to death, but poetry remains inpenetrable to me. Or I to it. I can't decide.

Can you get into poetry?

 

[Rumpleforeskin]

I can and I love to read it. I have four spiral-bound notebooks of poetry I wrote. I enjoy to read other poet's work and enjoy the beauty in the prose.

 

[beardpuller]

Many, many years ago, I was in college and the girl I thought was the most interesting person in the world asked me if I was going to a poetry reading that night by W.S. Merwin. I said I certainly was, that we should go together.
Then I sprinted down to the library to figure out who the **** W.S. Merwin was.
Turned out he was a pretty cool guy. He was late for the reading that night, but he had an explanation -- he'd stopped to help a dog who'd been hit by a car, which I figured was the sort of thing poets were supposed to do. His poetry was OK, too.
This was not the beginning of a lifelong love of verse or anything, but even today, 30 years later, I'll see one of his poems in The New Yorker or somewhere, and think, "Hey, I went to see that guy. He stopped to help a dog that was hit by a car. And his poetry was OK, too."

 

[pallister]

Bubs, you separated poetry and songwriting. I think the best songwriting is poetry. That I like. However, when it comes to reading people who are actual "poets," I'm not interested.

 

[joe]

I like a look of agony
Because I know it's true.
Men do not sham convultions
Nor simulate a throe.

The eyes glaze once, and that is death
Impossible to feign
The beads upon the forehead
By homely anguish strung.

-- Dickinson

 

[zeke12]

I always liked Auden's definition of poetry as "memorable speech".

I don't read a lot of poetry for pleasure, but I have my favorites that I'll reread from time to time. And I love a lot of it.

 

[jgmacg]

Are there forms of art you appreciate, but can't get into? Mine is poetry.

I was watching the American Experience on Walt Whitman tonight. I have an appreciation for what Whitman means to our culture, I understand how historically relevant he is, and God knows I could never write like him.

But that's just it ... I don't want to ever write like him. He might not have seemed purple prose-ish in his time, but by God does he ever now. All poetry, no matter what form, no matter whether it's traditional poetry form or stream of consciousness, just doesn't interest me at all. In fact, it bores me to tears. Yet, I appreciate it for the talent it takes to do it.

It's kind of like golf, I appreciate the hell out of the sport and those who play it, but I rarely watch it.

It's weird because I'm as pretentious as it gets with other art forms. I love film, art and music that challenges you intellectually in the same way good poetry does. I love great songwriters, playwrights and screenwriters to death, but poetry remains inpenetrable to me. Or I to it. I can't decide.

Can you get into poetry?

I'm not sure how you can distinguish modern songwriting from poetry. Read Dylan's lyrics. He's as much a poet as a lyricist.

In fact, modern music has largely replaced poetry in popular culture.

And Whitman isn't purple in the great scheme of things. His work remains supple and pretty muscular, especially relative to the Romantics and the Neo-classicists. If you want eggplant purple, give Wordsworth or Shelley or Byron a ride.

 

[pallister]

Hey, I said that first, jg!

 

[zeke12]

I agree with jg -- and I dig Whitman.

And I once had a knock-down, drag out with a lit. professor (and nun, it bears saying) who swore up and down that uncle Walt was straight as a Kansas highway.

 

[joe]

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.


And this one as well:

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

-- Pablo Neruda, perfect heartbreak in verse.

 

[jgmacg]

You did, indeed, Palli. I apologize. I went a little windy on the Romantics, and got beat to the poetry punch.

 

[pallister]

No problem at all. I'm glad someone with sreet cred backed up my post.

 

[rpmmutant]

There is no love in Mudville;
The Mighty Casey has struck out.

 

[Chi City 81]

My favorite poem:

In Songbird did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

[joe]

Sounds like Rush to me.

 

[jgmacg]

Thanks, Palli.

Because it's bedtime I'll ring off, but in every class I've ever taught, and here in the Workshop, I encourage young writers of every kind to read and write as much poetry as they can stomach.

It's the purest application of language, and in a lot of ways it's the purest form of storytelling. I write a lot of it by way of simple exercise, and read a lot of it to keep me in touch with what's possible. I read Whitman at my wife's grandpa's funeral.

If Whitman's not your guy, try Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams. Or Frost or Sandburg or Adrienne Rich. If you want great poetry of the ordinary, of the everyday, read Seamus Heaney or Charlie Simic. Billy Collins, from the PBS show tonight, is terrific. Or Donald Hall, who's as big a baseball fan as anyone on this site. Philip Levine for the poetry of American Work, or Jim Dickey for the poetry of the American South. Bukowski, Merwin, Jarrell. Ginsberg, Eliot, Auden, Thomas, Plath.

There's someone out there who'll crack your head open. In a good way. It just takes some time to find them.

 

[zeke12]

Since I name-dropped Auden...

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

 

[Chi City 81]

Thanks, Palli.

Because it's bedtime I'll ring off, but in every class I've ever taught, and here in the Workshop, I encourage young writers of every kind to read and write as much poetry as they can stomach.

It's the purest application of language, and in a lot of ways it's the purest form of storytelling. I write a lot of it by way of simple exercise, and read a lot of it to keep me in touch with what's possible. I read Whitman at my wife's grandpa's funeral.

If Whitman's not your guy, try Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams. Or Frost or Sandburg or Adrienne Rich. If you want great poetry of the ordinary, of the everyday, read Seamus Heaney or Charlie Simic. Billy Collins, from the PBS show tonight, is terrific. Or Donald Hall, who's as big a baseball fan as anyone on this site. Philip Levine for the poetry of American Work, or Jim Dickey for the poetry of the American South. Bukowski, Merwin, Jarrell. Ginsberg, Eliot, Auden, Thomas, Plath.

There's someone out there who'll crack your head open. In a good way. It just takes some time to find them.

No love for Coleridge?

 

[pallister]

I do like Coleridge, Doc. "Mariner" is a good lyric poem as well.

jg, my current job is the first in my career in which I have no outlet to write. So I started writing in my spare time a couple of years ago. It's all songwriting/poetry of some sort. It's very cathartic, and often I find I don't really know what I'm thinking until I write it down.

However, as much as I enjoy writing lyrics and such, I just can't get past more than a poem or two when I'm at the bookstore searching for new stuff to read. Not sure why, but it just doesn't appeal to me.

 

[zeke12]

Oh, and since jg dropped WCW...

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Perfection.