Turning to poetry
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| T.S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Mark Strand |
Do you like poetry? I do. And that definitely puts me in the minority. I know this because, in all the years that I taught English, I would be lucky if a fourth of my students actually said they liked poetry to begin with.
So I want to talk about poetry now because, 1) I don't have a book to review and 2) I'm feeling a bit melancholic. Actually, I think I started feeling melancholic after reading a few poems. Yes, I like the sad kinds.
I used to start my poetry units by asking my students who among them like poetry. As I explained, I'd feel lucky if 10 out of 40 say they do. Most of the time, around 5 raise their hands. Granted that majority of my teaching life was in a school for boys, these were the more well-off boys, so I sort of hoped for greater literary exposure.
Ah, but who am I kidding? A lot of the well-off don't like poetry. A lot of voracious readers don't like poetry. I daresay most of each group. And maybe you can't blame them. After all, what is the individual's general experience with poetry? Usually, poems are met in schools, with us teachers who want to pick a poem clean out of its soul because the students have to "understand" it.
Which brings me to this line I have never forgotten from that Robert Redford movie, "A River Runs Through It"--We can still love them--we can love completely without complete understanding.
I ask you, do you need to understand someone completely before you can love him? In my experience, no. Do you need to understand a poem completely before you can love it? In my experience, no.
If you read a poem and you cognitively understand it, then well and good. I applaud you. But if you read a poem and you get it, even if you don't understand every single thing, then, yeah, I'd say you appreciate the poem. Hell, if you don't understand a single word, but you like the patter of the rhythm as you read the words under your breath, then that's good enough for me.
My blog name up there? It's from this--
I have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffeespoons.
- T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Until he says,
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
Or the lines from which I took my blog title. Or ...
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think they will sing to me.
I understand Prufrock so much better now, but I won't pretend to completely understand everything. But it is still my favorite poem, both because of what it says and because I first fell in love with how it sounded when I read it aloud.
I couldn't understand my other favorite poem either when I first read it. But, oh man, I loved the rhythm. I felt like rapping it when I read it aloud (alone, in the library). I mean Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. Try it, I tell you you can sing it.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
While I nodded nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
'Tis some visitor, I muttered, tapping at my chamber door,
Only this, and nothing more!
I often told my students that poetry is an oral and an aural art. I'm not sure if this is true, but this is my experience. I think poems have to be said; they have to be heard. Much in the same way as plays need to be seen, not just read, in order to be fully appreciated. So, if you notice, both poems above have strong rhythm. I mean, think about it--our first experience with poetry was really the nursery rhymes that our moms or kindergarten teachers used to sing to us. Or, at least, that was my first experience with poetry. And that is why, I guess, I prefer poems with rhyme or regular rhythm.
Though not always. This poetry post was inspired because I was browsing through Book Depository, looking for Mark Strand books. Mark Strand is one of my favorite poets, because I had read this:
Keeping Things Whole
Or the lines from which I took my blog title. Or ...
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think they will sing to me.
I understand Prufrock so much better now, but I won't pretend to completely understand everything. But it is still my favorite poem, both because of what it says and because I first fell in love with how it sounded when I read it aloud.
I couldn't understand my other favorite poem either when I first read it. But, oh man, I loved the rhythm. I felt like rapping it when I read it aloud (alone, in the library). I mean Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. Try it, I tell you you can sing it.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
While I nodded nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
'Tis some visitor, I muttered, tapping at my chamber door,
Only this, and nothing more!
I often told my students that poetry is an oral and an aural art. I'm not sure if this is true, but this is my experience. I think poems have to be said; they have to be heard. Much in the same way as plays need to be seen, not just read, in order to be fully appreciated. So, if you notice, both poems above have strong rhythm. I mean, think about it--our first experience with poetry was really the nursery rhymes that our moms or kindergarten teachers used to sing to us. Or, at least, that was my first experience with poetry. And that is why, I guess, I prefer poems with rhyme or regular rhythm.
Though not always. This poetry post was inspired because I was browsing through Book Depository, looking for Mark Strand books. Mark Strand is one of my favorite poets, because I had read this:
Keeping Things Whole
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
The language is simple and direct. The idea, not so much, but I love it. I love it enough to use it as my Twitter Bio and Shelfari intro. I don't think poetry should be flowery to say something profound. In truth, the most beautiful poems I've come across are the ones that have simple language.
I don't think, either, that I need to immerse myself in all the literary theory discussions before I can say I truly love a poem. I don't want to. I don't have to. I find poems that speak to me, and I like them. And I'd rather not complicate it more than that. Yes, like Archibald MacLeish, I think that "a poem should not mean/ but be." I think you don't need to understand poetry so much as walk into it.
So, what about you? Do you like poetry? What poems do you love? Maybe you could also share some of your favorite lines. I ask for lines because I believe some of us do go around whispering poetry under our breath or think of poetic lines when the situation fits. Then again, maybe that's just me...but I don't think so.
Comments
Like you I believe that poetry can be appreciated by the mere reading and sound of it. A good poem stirs something in you and allow the reader to experience the poem as oppose to understanding it. My favorite lines are:
" If i can stop one heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain" - E. Dickinson
"The light wraps you in its mortal flame / Abstracted pale mourner, standing that way/against the old propellers of the twilight/ that revolved around you" - Neruda
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments. Love is not love/Which alters when its alteration finds" - Shakespeare.
I got carried away. Thanks for sharing your love for poetry.
Dickinson, Neruda, and Shakespeare! I love those guys, too. And you picked the one from Sonnet 116!
Am sharing a Pinoy poet's lovely poem called Bonsai (Edith Tiempo) here on my personal blog:
http://thegrayspots.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/bonsai-by-edith-l-tiempo/
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet.
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
"As I read Keats's letters (who spells badly like me), I came across his theory of negative capability: an endorsement of mystery, of developing your capacity to accept mystery without 'irritable searching after fact and reason'. I began to realize that perhaps poetry is not so much in need of understanding as loving, or being enchanted, seduced, intrigued and awed. Like eating something delicious, you don't need to know how it was made; all you need to do is enjoy it."
This is from Jane Campion's introduction to the only (for shame!) book of poetry that I own, the Vintage Classics collection of John Keats's poems and letters called Bright Star, a tie-in to the Keats biopic of the same name directed by Campion, which is the subject of a review I wrote here, where I practically told my less than exemplary relationship with poetry:
"I’m not particularly good with poetry. My attempts at understanding poems (the supposedly great ones, at least), let alone composing them, have invariably ended with me scratching my head, exhausted and plagued with prosodic perplexities. Those I did understand, although very remotely, were either explained to me by reading guides or by my uncle who used to read poems, such as William Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis and William Earnest Henley’s Invictus, to me when I was only a curious little sponge. Something about the restrictive nature of poems, the significance of their rhymes (or absence thereof), and their tendency towards abrupt diversions make them a particularly tough nut to crack, so tough in fact that once upon a time I indefinitely swore off making a stab at a poem that is more than four verses long. However, after watching Jane Campion’s biopic of John Keats, one of the most celebrated poets in history, at least twice, I see that pact I made with myself finally has to be broken.
[...]
Bright Star took its title from John’s sonnet about Fanny, which begins with those two words, a fitting description of the former for the latter. I remember having encountered that poem in the distant past and, it being more than four verses long, I didn’t give it much thought, because as I have said [...] and like Fanny in the beginning of the film, I was, is, not very bright with poetry. So during the scene when Fanny asked John how to properly understand a poem, I just had to pay attention to his answer: 'A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.' Surely, we all could use a bit of mystery in our lives. And John Keats could very well have been talking to me."
The First Dream by Billy Collins
The wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning
as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.
He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,
how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.
Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,
except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,
you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.
@Aldrin - "I began to realize that perhaps poetry is not so much in need of understanding as loving, or being enchanted, seduced, intrigued and awed." and " Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."--Exactly! And I read your post. I've only seen Campion's The Piano, but your review got me interested in Bright Star.
By the way, you're braver than me. I never tried to write my own poems. Never thought I could plumb those mysteries. Just immerse myself in them.:)
http://pelikula.tumblr.com/post/486768574/the-piano
Haha. I hope you'll get to watch Bright Star, and I hope you'll love it as much as I do.
Oh, and my attempts at poetry always end in failure (I'm not being self-deprecating, mind). Or corny haikus. So I may be brave, but I'm also a fool. :p
"Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, / A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou / Beside me singing in the Wilderness - / And Wilderness is Paradise enow."
"For in and out, above, about, below, / 'Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show, / Play'd in a Box whose Candle is the Sun, / Round which we Phantom Figures come and go."
I used to write poems on margins of my notebooks (Blooey can attest to this). Too bad I haven't been writing that kind of stuff lately. Time to pop in Dead Poets Society and be inspired once again.
But really, I love how a poem can stir something inside you at the moment you understand what it means---whether it is on the first reading or after hours of laboring through every line or couplet or consulting all those guides to figure out the entirety.
I read somewhere that one sad thing about poetry is that there are more people who write than read it. And I’m sort guilty. Anyway, I like Dickinson. The simplicity of her words makes her verses easy to memorize and the depth, hard to forget. I also enjoy these two poems of Angela Manalang-Gloria. (But of course she has other beautiful ones.)
"Wisdom"
I
When I was young and sixteen
I thought the world well lost
For love that like a standard
Led all the shining host.
Now that I’m grown to wisdom
And seen how loves are furled
Like all discarded banners –
I’d rather have the world.
II
When I was young and moon-eyed
I thought the world was made
Of fabric such as moonlight
Could weave o’er man and maid.
It took me years of wisdom
To find my world, alas,
Circumference in lucre
Within a coin of brass.
"Change"
I have outgrown them all, and one by one,
These loves I took so mightily to heart
Before you came: the dolls that overran
My childhood hours and taught me fairy art;
The books I ravished by the censored score;
Music that like delirium burned my days;
The golden calf I fashioned to adore
When lately I forsook the golden phrase.
And thus I shall outgrow this love for you.
Sooner or later I shall put away
This jewelled ecstasy for something new.
Brand me not fickle on that fatal day:
Bereft of change that is my drink and bread,
I would not love you now. I would be dead.
The funny thing is that even if I do not understand it, I write poetry. Is that weird? I have a blog of poetry that is a semi-secret. I mean it's out there open for anyone to see. But I don't tell people about it. Because I think, if I don't understand what poetry is about, how I can write it, right? But I don't know what it is -- maybe it is a compulsion to write them.
Weird.
Anyway, back to you. This post is great. I love your analogy -- do you need to understand somebody to love him? Wow. What an epiphany. It helps me two ways -- it helps me open up to the idea of just reading poems even if I don't understand them; I usually feel frustrated not being able to understand, And and after reading this, I realize I don't have to feel like that. I just have to enjoy whatever I can get out of it.
The other way it helps me -- hmm, is more personal. It somehow answers the dilemma that inspires this poem: http://restingfromprose.blogspot.com/2009/11/curious.html
Congratulations for receiving the record holder of the longest blog comment ever.
@Rise - Szymborska's always been recommended to me, but I never got around to reading a lot of her poems. Oh, but the Rubaiyat is beautiful!
@Gege - I accept the award for record holder of your longest comment ever. Actually, I'm pleasantly surprised that many people take to this topic, enough to post really lengthy comments. I'm glad to find a lot of poetry lovers here, too. I've visited your poetry blog a couple of times before, and after reading that particular poem, I understand what you mean.:)