Prosaic
Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong:
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
– Shelley
As someone who’s been addicted to the stuff from the first glee of listening to A.A. Milne before bedtime…
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
Alice is marrying one of the guard.
“A soldier’s life is terrible hard,”
Says Alice.
….I still wonder why people have pretty much given up on poetry. Though I’ll admit that it’s undoubtedly a fallacy to think that, in olden days, hoi polloi went about quoting their favourite bard. Still, it has clearly taken a beating.
Here in France, anyway, the dead greats are still memorized in school – very few new voices in the curriculum – and everywhere it continues to be hauled out at weddings and funerals and what passes for verse on greeting cards.
So either it’s still a source of comfort and inspiration, or merely retained for its ability to supply familiar phrases for quick bonding. Either way, it reveals an unspoken reverence – an understanding that the poetry that’s remained in our collective imagination has an ability to express what we cannot, and an eloquence beyond our means.
That said, I suspect that the most oft-quoted canon is quite small – Shakespeare, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Auden and Thomas… all those we had to memorize in school.
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller fleas to bite ‘em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Thus every poet, in his kind,
Is bit by him that comes behind.
– Swinburne
It’s commonplace but maybe still worth wondering whether poetry’s current demise is due to the eradication of imposed structure: no longer forced to adhere to rhyme or syllabic strictures, it has gone the way of all artistic movements in a cycle of con and destruction. But, unlike other forms of expression, it never really landed on its feet – pushed out of the mainstream and relegated to the effete, the nostalgic, and the young man looking to get laid.
Despite the fact that there is still a handful of brave and brilliant poets in our midst, so much of the verse found in those few august publications – Harper’s, the New Yorker, the LRB, etc. – which still offer the stuff is painfully rife with dabbles like:
… I stand under, I understand,
A gean tree, suddenly,
Kyotoishly…
Which may strike as clever at first, but just don’t stand up to re-reading. Like any art form, the mark of fine poetry lies in its ability to withstand sustained scrutiny. Its beauty in the gradual unravelling and deciphering of its intimacy over time, its continued ability to surprise and lodge images and cadence in your mindscape.
I suppose some would argue that contemporary music is its heir, and who needs the damn stuff anyway. But I for one am grateful for the plunge from Donne to Carson – and, yeah, even the embarrassing, pretentious years of T.S. Eliot veneration – and would love to be informed that poetry is alive and well (or, at the very least, that you still have a dazzling bit lodged in your brain).
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Comment
- I’m with you, on missing poetry’s place in life as we know it.
I don’t read much new poetry, other than what I get in a very few magazines. I don’t know why I don’t make time for it, not to mention the time to read novels.
Maybe it’s the ‘too much information’ syndrome, (i.e. I spend inordinate amounts of time on the web, reading good sites, searching for new ones, and reading all kinds of online magazines, newspapers, etc.
Guess I need to have a talk with myself.
— peggy Nov 12, 8:03pm # - I miss poetry in English in the same way that I miss a heightened register there. Rhyme always bothered me unless it was truly masterful, but that’s personal taste. It was the old alliterative stuff like Beowulf that turned me on. For my modern English poetry kick I end up going to Seamus Heaney (no surprise there) and, lately, Billy Collins. Poetry is alive and well in Icelandic, though. I take solace there.
— sterna Nov 12, 8:53pm # - In the English tradition poetry, for almost a thousand years, was also the primary form of narrative in English literature. What we think of as prose fiction existed, but not really as we know it today (until about 300 or so years ago). Most of the poetry that survives as ‘classic’ in the English tradition is narrative to some degree or other (Browning, even Eliot to a degree), with remarkably few acceptions.
The problem is that the poetic register, no matter how hard it tries, is rarely as democratic as the prose register. It also requires a good deal more effort, and in some cases even training, to deal with. As literature gets more and more populist (there are still tons of cries about elitist literature, but very little of today’s most elitist novels even come close to the elitism of even 70 years ago) the focus necessarily shifts more and more on to registers that are easier for the general population to deal with, and as always, the emphasis stays with narrative. Prose fiction is on the rise, not because nobody cares about poetry, but because one of poetry’s functions was usurped, and the populist critics, and more importantly readers, are less and less willing to deal with forms that may give them difficulty.
— August Nov 12, 10:51pm # - Good point there regarding the accessibility or democracy of poetry. But there’s a scale, no? Billy Collins prides himself on accessibility. I suppose one could argue that he uses a prose register. Eminem, however, does not. Not all of his content is to my taste, to be sure, but he’s a master of rhyme and rhythm in the vernacular.
— sterna Nov 12, 11:58pm # - I guess that you are right with your comment about popular music taking over from poetry but very few of the lyrics could ever be thought poetic. I was never a big fan of anything that didn’t rhyme. The only poets that ever touched a nerve with me were John Cooper Clarke and Linton Kwesi Johnson. The first was hilarious and rattled off his poetry at a machine gun pace with his broad Manchester accent. The second was more heart-felt, usually in Jamaican patois and often dealing with race issues.
— Adrian Nov 13, 12:14am # - alligator pie
alligator pie
if i don’t get some i think i’m gonna die
take away the green grass
take away the sky
but please don’t take my alligator pie…
from my (very) canadian childhood…simple rhymes that turn into poetry
— Nikii Nov 13, 2:32am # - Does anyone else think of Jack the Ripper when reading Prufrock? Someone put that thought in my head earlier this week and it seems to have stuck.
— gord Nov 13, 3:35am # - Oh, and is there really a big difference in poems and pomes?
Other than the spelling.
— gord Nov 13, 3:38am # - I realize this is no new, fresh voice, but somehow I managed only to discover Langston Hughes um, this week (I am young, blame my youth, always blame my youth…).
Democracy
Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.
I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.
Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.
I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.
— Ben Nov 13, 4:39am # - “One has to go back to THE RUBIYAT or SOHRAB & RUSTUM to find narrative skills of this order. OMEROS earned a Nobel for Derek Walcott, and THE FOLDING CLIFFS elevates Merwin to the position of America’s foremost candidate for that award.”
http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=5522
“A thrilling historical narrative—taut and skillful and full of lost values. Merwin creates a powerful poetic narrative with great intimacy and humanity.”—MICHAEL ONDAATJE
“A bold and stunning chronicle of Hawaii, all the way back to its creation in past ages when volcanoes thrust upward through the blue surface of the Pacific—all beautifully fashioned in a rare epic poetry which is also a kind of transcendent prose. A classic.”—PETER MATTHIESSEN
http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=0-375-70151-6
— vernaculo Nov 13, 5:20am # - I remember a conversation I had during university with a burgeoning poet who was excited at a new technique he had discovered. He imagined the sounds of his words as the various sounds in a drum kit: the cymbals, tom-toms, bass, and snare, and this, he believed, gave him a new way to play with the musicality of language. He considered himself a jazz poet.
As it turned out, I had just read a turn-of-the-century textbook called English Poetry: Its Principles and Progress. Published in 1919, the “English poetry” of its title refers exclusively to British poets, and it included—as necessary to the study of English lit.—a fold-out chronology of English kings since 1500. (I was a bit of a poetry geek at the time.)
The introduction, however, was a lengthy and wonderfully thorough treatment of the mechanics of metrical verse and rhyme, including a detailed analysis of tonality. It talked intelligently about the choices of consonants and vowels and their combinations to evoke moods—stately, comic, sullen, light, or otherwise. The short “i” in “fit,” apparently, has one of the highest pitches in English; the “u” in “full,” one of the lowest.
Listening to my poet friend describe his “discovery,” I couldn’t help thinking that, regardless of changes in poetic style and fashion—regardless of what kind of poetry you want to read or write—the “cycle of con and destruction,” as you put it, has destroyed real knowledge about how words work, about the full potential of language.
— Peter Atwood Nov 13, 10:18am # - Your quote reminded me what a target A.A. Milne has been for parodists. I put some examples on my blog but those who cherish the originals should avert their eyes.
I think poetry remains more popular than anyone realises. I’ve sometimes discovered that young people who I thought were only interested in pop music had a great interest in poetry. Perhaps the lyrics of the better examples of the former had led them to the latter.
— Willie Nov 13, 7:25pm # - There’s been a great upsurge of interest in poetry, at least in the UK, with poetry readings (slams?) – or do you think (as might be the case) that it is more noise than reality? Even more recently, there were various columns by Ruth Padel (poet with a daunting biography) collected in ‘52 ways of looking at a poem’ 2002 but in paperback 2004 – fascinating poems in there, whether or not you agree with her analysis. See review:http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr92-4/mcdonald.htm
— Margaret Nov 13, 7:52pm # - Poetry slams are huge here. There is a semester-long poetry class at the small public high school where I teach, and it’s full with a waiting list, and even boys take it proudly. I guess California has its charms.
There is also a wonderful local poet who goes to schools and does workshops with students to help them write and understand poetry, and having sat in on one, they can be quite magical and transformative.
One of my exuberant 17-year-old students, arguably the smartest boy at the school, is a poetry fanatic. He recently participated in a national poetry slam, flying to St. Louis to do so, and also self-published a chapbook containing eleven poems, called, “Angst is Lame”
I’ll get it from school and send some bits of it your way. It’s far from the usual awful teen luuuuv poems one expects at that age. So yes, there is hope in the upcoming generation, albeit in slightly less elegant forms than nineteenth and twentieth century poets might deem worthy, but hey, the times, they are a-changin’!
— wizmo Nov 13, 10:22pm # - Swift.
Swinburne’s the guy who wrote:
For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
And all the seasons of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover from lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain, and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
— eric Nov 14, 9:57pm # - OK, here goes, here’s one of the chapbook poems by my 17-year-old student, as promised above:
Cathode Ray Gods
So don’t get me wrong,
I love the Simpsons and I hated the Illiad,
but the way we’ve gone from one Homer to another as the great voice of our culture, well,
it’s just insidious.
But was it really such a bad trade?
Now that the books are burned by apathy and low-level radiation,
now that we traded in our paper for glass,
words, for images,
a typeset or hand script for cathode ray tubes or liquid crystals,
a provocation of thought for a paralyzing command:
‘This is the way it is. Your imagination has no place here. Your vision is wrong.’
Oh if only they’d been caught red-handed when they were stealing the children of our mind,
blinding us with red hot ads,
now we’re finding kids with battered creativity,
who couldn’t see themselves because they never thought to look any way but straight ahead,
and now no one minds that my god, we’ve been swindled!
They stole our lives in great chunks,
half hour segments vanished before our very eyes,
and where there should have been an apology,
or at least an IOU,
was an exultation of some cheap plastic crap and I am pissed off
‘Oh but Evan think of the children, do it for the children’
GODDAMNIT Maude I AM doing this for the children,
I’m throwong this f’kakteh box out the fifth story window
because I am a puritan
and this box is witchcraft
and gravity shall be our FIERY SALVATION!
Call me Jonathan Edwards, honey
because you sinners are in the hands of an angry god!
Repent Idolaters!
Repent and cast your cathode ray gods into the sea!
‘But Evan, think of the environment!”
GODDAMNIT Maude, I am thinking of the environmnent!
I’m thinking of my mental environment!
Repent and drive your righteous fist right through that serene sinner’s sinister slick glass face!
Cast the first stone, and the second and the third!
They can’t make it up to us,
the returns line would stretch around the world
and I forgot my receipt anyway
and store credit just won’t do anyway
(what the fuck am I gonna buy anyway?)
you can’t buy back the years that turned out blank and staticky
even fresh out of the box.
they just don’t make ‘em like they used to,
The proletariat is irrevocably pissed,
because the public service announcements only served to rationalize our addiction,
and from the window of my rehab cell,
I look out onto the lonesome crowded west
and wish that the corporate bog god machine would have had the decency not to sugarcoat it for me.
— susan bein Nov 16, 12:11am # - Oh, I am heartened to hear about poetry slams (but curious about the moniker). I suspect that poetry readings never really died, and I’m curious to know why teenagers automatically turn to poetry when first trying to express themselves.
Plus I think Miss Bein has a budding brilliance on her hands. Huzzah!
— gail Nov 17, 11:52am # - ‘Great’, building-tall poetry in Antwerp there is… Decorating the ‘Boerentoren’ (Tour des Paysans). And an appointed City Poet and all. And Antwerp is going to great lengths to win the attention of the public for it, even blocking mayor motorways with Great Roadworks…
http://www.visitantwerpen.be/wereldboekenstad.html
— Raf Nov 17, 12:30pm # - As someone who ‘lost’ several thousand dollars publishing poetry, and who still considers it money well spent, I think I have purchased a right to an opinion. The purposes of poetry (which is not to say its function), are not understood any more, nor are they much discussed. Poetry that happens in a cultural, intellectual and, yes, spiritual vaccum is just wordplay. The popularity of ‘poetry slams’ is a symptom of the loss of poetry, not of its ressurection: we have competitions to award exhibitionists while being unable to explain what makes a great poem great. At least, most of us can’t explain it. It just bought Geoffrey Hill’s most recent book of essays Style and Faith, which goes some lengths to explaining the particular greatness of Donne. [Hill’s own poetry gets more difficult every year, and I’m not convinced that it is getting greater; but the first poem in his first book was great, so progress must be difficult]. I just finished reading Marius Kociejowski’s The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool, which is a travel book about Syria but which, I think it can be claimed, is completely about poetry (it is also completely about some other things; it is a very complete book). These are books that concern themselves with what poetry is, and increasingly it seems to me that some kind of conversation needs to happen about poetry. The conversation is, just now, more important than the poetry itself.
— John Hudson Nov 19, 6:24am # - See the latest NY Times Sunday Book Review feature on poetry:
“The Book Review recently asked a handful of poets and critics to respond to this question: What book of poetry, published in the last 25 years, has meant the most to you personally—the book you have found yourself returning to again and again? We asked them not to select reissues, or volumes of a poet’s ‘’selected’’ or ‘’collected’’ work. Here are their responses:”
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/books/review/21SYMPOSI.html?oref=login&8bu
— leslee Nov 20, 4:47am # - Poetry slams are a third-generation mutancy of Werner Erhard’s lab-rat resurrectionism, est.
Marianne Moore at a poetry slam?
Elizabeth Bishop?
Plath?
John Milton?
Ginsberg maybe but he’d go anywhere, as a test, because he was a champion of going anywhere, as a test.
Gary Snyder could do it, if he wanted, but whether he’d want to is a debatable unknown.
Auden? Smoking and talking youth-slang?
Auden as a mature poet? Because that’s part of it. The authority’s like everything else in the mercantile arena, tilted toward the moldable young.
Lorca eschewed the metaphoric competition for the real thing, and it cost him, and us, dearly; but still, who could argue against his decision?
Poetry slams aren’t a wrong direction, holding them up as proof of poetry’s contemporary viablity is, or may be, depending on what else you hold up with them.
Michael Ondaatje could easily not be recognized, at some packed-cafe P.C. group grope, for what he is as a poet, for what poetry is in his hands.
— vernaculo Nov 22, 1:27am # - What if what we hold up along with poetry slams is William Dunbar?
— sterna Nov 23, 1:59am #
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