No.37 - June 2019
David Graham's POETIC LICENSE 2019 June No.37
Favoring Poems
Favoring Poems
Not long ago I participated in one of those Favorite Poem events, at which various citizens stand up to recite a poem that they love and then say a few words about why. I love such occasions. The icing on the cake this time was that the reading was held at a public library. The free public lending library is one of America’s greatest contributions to world culture. (I believe we have Benjamin Franklin to thank for the concept, along with his invention of bifocals and a pretty nifty stove.)
Further joy came from the fact that not all the readers were themselves poets. If you attend a great many open mics, as I do, it can sometimes seem as if few people except fellow poets are interested in the stuff; and that many open mic attendees are mostly infatuated by their own work. (These two things may well be related.) For me there are few things more dispiriting than the joker who rises near the end of the open mic and announces he or she is going to read a poem composed while the rest of us were speaking. There’s always such a poet, it seems. If you were one of the previous readers, it’s annoying to hear someone loudly and usually proudly announce that they weren’t really listening. And without fail the poem is awful, because how could it not be—written in a rush, with no revision, by some genius who clearly isn’t in love with poetry, just his or her own ragged effusions. There can be a small nasty pleasure in confirming this, but it’s still discouraging. The vanity of bad poets can be breathtaking.
Another attraction of the Favorite Poem event, in contrast, is the near certainty of hearing some really great poems. Not all of them will be masterpieces, but let’s just say the batting average is better than at your normal open mic. For my part I especially love hearing the old chestnuts, which frankly happens all too seldom at open mics or even readings by contemporary poets in academic settings. Whitman and Housman and Bradstreet and Hopkins and Shakespeare and Yeats and Dickinson and Wordsworth and Frost and Hughes are considered classics for good reason. And it strikes me that, outside of classrooms, we hear their words spoken aloud all too seldom. Many of the older classics were meant for aural consumption, in fact. I even enjoy schmaltzy uplifting ear-candy like Kipling’s “If,” which is regularly unveiled on such occasions. I may not wish to listen to it every day, but it’s like a Sousa march: a great toe-tapper that gets my poetic blood flowing every time.
Not only is there very little vanity at such readings, but there’s also almost no snobbery in evidence.
The concept of the Favorite Poem reading was Robert Pinsky’s, a project he originally cooked up during his stint as Poet Laureate. I’m glad to see it still thriving all these years later. His original idea involves two elements I find particularly important. First, the emphasis on experiencing poetry aloud is crucial, a harkening back to poetry’s most ancient roots. Many readers choose to recite from memory as well, which is another venerable and valuable tradition. Memorization and recitation remind us, as Pinsky has often stressed, that poetry comes alive most when it is experienced physically. Knowing a poem by heart, after all, means that the body is as much involved as the mind.
A second key element is Pinsky’s request that readers say something about why they chose that particular poem. That brilliantly simple stipulation has a number of benefits. It personalizes the discussion; these are not lectures but testimonies. It foregrounds pleasure and inspiration and the relevance of poetry to all realms of life. Thus it demonstrates, without any need to argue the point, that of course Poetry Can Matter, to turn Dana Gioia’s well known question into the statement it deserves to be. It’s heartening to see how many different ways poetry does matter to a broad cross section of the reading public, many of whom are seldom seen at your average poetry reading. It’s good for us poets to rub shoulders with civilians, and see what we have in common. At Favorite Poem events you hear a lot of touching stories of how this poem or that one consoled, troubled, encouraged, challenged, inspired, or otherwise moved ordinary folk in numerous ways. As such the audience is not only transported by the beauty of the poems, but is also removed far from the jealousies, fleeting controversies, one-upsmanship, careerism, and other inbred concerns of the world of PoBiz.
Another thing I love about Favorite Poem readings is that almost always I hear a poem that is new to me, or come to appreciate one I already know in a fresh way. It’s easy to forget, if you mostly read poems silently on page or screen that the ear can in some ways be wiser than the silent mind.
At the reading I attended, this happened to me with the following poem by Anne Porter, a poet I was dimly aware of but whose work I did not really know:
Music
When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother’s piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold
And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying
Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country
I’ve never understood
Why this is so
But there’s an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow
For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest
And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country
We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams
And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows
Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.
--from Living Things. Zoland Books, 2006.
The reader, as it happens, was a musician and composer. He spoke feelingly about the connections he felt with the ideas and the emotions in this poem about music’s power to convey both beauty and desolation. As I listened, I felt these things also, but I was mostly carried away by the quiet and understated music of the language, impressed by Porter’s skill at conveying her theme so potently in words and sentences quite simple and straightforward. I suspect that had my eye run across this poem in a magazine, I would have dismissed it too quickly as obvious and blandly stated. If I’d read the poem silently on the page I might also have been bothered, as a friend was, that the poem plainly echoes, at least in some details of plot and theme, a famous one by D.H. Lawrence, called “Piano.” Instead, I was moved, hearing Porter’s words read aloud by someone who felt them profoundly, by the parallel powers of the poetic and the musical arts, and their ability to suggest things which are beyond words—which as the poem dramatizes, is quite often a bittersweet experience, where beauty can be inextricable with melancholy, longing, and loss.
And what poem did I recite at this event? It was Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” long one of my personal favorites. But since I’ve written about Hayden in a previous column, I’ll end this one with another lyric I cherish, which I’ll probably present at the next Favorite Poem reading that I attend.
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides—
You may have met Him--did you not
His notice sudden is—
The Grass divides as with a Comb—
A spotted shaft is seen—
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on—
He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too cool for Corn—
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot—
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone—
Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me—
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality—
But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone—
Am I afraid of snakes? You bet. I know it’s irrational, but for me that’s the poem’s first appeal, the solidarity I feel with Dickinson in puzzling over this common bit of unreason. But as a poet and long-time teacher, I’m equally in love with her brilliant craft. Dickinson is famous for her intellectual brilliance, of course, her searching honesties and sharp-eyed investigations of spiritual and psychological extremities. She's equally renowned for her poetic eccentricities, including her reliance on dashes as her major punctuation mark and her fondness for capitalizing many nouns, as was fashionable in previous eras of English poetry. But many brilliant and eccentric poets have been lost to historical memory. Why are we still admiring and learning from Dickinson? "In poetry everything is permitted," Chilean poet Nicanor Parra advised young poets, adding as seemingly casual afterthought this stiff qualification: "you have to improve the blank page."
No poet improved a blank page more stunningly than Dickinson at her best. Among her great gifts as poet is the knack for absolutely memorable phrasemaking. Not even Keats can outdo Dickinson in pithy quotability. Perhaps only Shakespeare is her equal. At the most fundamental level I love this lyric for its absolute memorability of phrasing. In fact, it’s not all that hard to memorize, which I know because I’m terrible at memorization and yet have it by heart.
The poem's story is a simple one: a boy comes upon a snake in the weeds and is startled by it; then the poet poses but does not answer the big question: why are people so afraid of snakes, anyway? Even those who love all other of "Nature's People" can be startled into "tighter breathing" by a simple encounter with a common garden snake.
What makes this straightforward lyric a near-perfect poem has much to do with Dickinson's ability to turn a phrase, sketch a scene, craft an image or metaphor. Who could ever forget her snake parting the tall grass "as with a Comb," or the way it "wrinkled and was gone" as the boy-narrator stoops to grab what he thinks is a dropped buggy-whip in the grass? And what a perfect compressed metaphor for a snake is that whip--visually accurate, naturally, but also carrying implications of danger, pain, punishment, shock.
But she saves the most brilliant touch for the final phrase. Wondering about the primal fear many people feel for serpents, which provokes that shocked "tighter breathing," she leaves us to ponder the implications of "Zero at the Bone"--the chill of great fear? a bone-deep metaphysical loneliness? the scary absence of final answers? However one interprets that marvelous concluding phrase, chances are you'll never forget it.
When I first encountered that phrase, well over forty years ago, before I had published a single poem myself, it struck me with a lifelong jolt. As the saying goes, I felt seen. I felt a deep kinship with this strange genius who died long before I was born, but who nonetheless perfectly expressed the bone-deep fear of snakes that I have known since I was myself “a boy, and barefoot.”
Not long ago I participated in one of those Favorite Poem events, at which various citizens stand up to recite a poem that they love and then say a few words about why. I love such occasions. The icing on the cake this time was that the reading was held at a public library. The free public lending library is one of America’s greatest contributions to world culture. (I believe we have Benjamin Franklin to thank for the concept, along with his invention of bifocals and a pretty nifty stove.)
Further joy came from the fact that not all the readers were themselves poets. If you attend a great many open mics, as I do, it can sometimes seem as if few people except fellow poets are interested in the stuff; and that many open mic attendees are mostly infatuated by their own work. (These two things may well be related.) For me there are few things more dispiriting than the joker who rises near the end of the open mic and announces he or she is going to read a poem composed while the rest of us were speaking. There’s always such a poet, it seems. If you were one of the previous readers, it’s annoying to hear someone loudly and usually proudly announce that they weren’t really listening. And without fail the poem is awful, because how could it not be—written in a rush, with no revision, by some genius who clearly isn’t in love with poetry, just his or her own ragged effusions. There can be a small nasty pleasure in confirming this, but it’s still discouraging. The vanity of bad poets can be breathtaking.
Another attraction of the Favorite Poem event, in contrast, is the near certainty of hearing some really great poems. Not all of them will be masterpieces, but let’s just say the batting average is better than at your normal open mic. For my part I especially love hearing the old chestnuts, which frankly happens all too seldom at open mics or even readings by contemporary poets in academic settings. Whitman and Housman and Bradstreet and Hopkins and Shakespeare and Yeats and Dickinson and Wordsworth and Frost and Hughes are considered classics for good reason. And it strikes me that, outside of classrooms, we hear their words spoken aloud all too seldom. Many of the older classics were meant for aural consumption, in fact. I even enjoy schmaltzy uplifting ear-candy like Kipling’s “If,” which is regularly unveiled on such occasions. I may not wish to listen to it every day, but it’s like a Sousa march: a great toe-tapper that gets my poetic blood flowing every time.
Not only is there very little vanity at such readings, but there’s also almost no snobbery in evidence.
The concept of the Favorite Poem reading was Robert Pinsky’s, a project he originally cooked up during his stint as Poet Laureate. I’m glad to see it still thriving all these years later. His original idea involves two elements I find particularly important. First, the emphasis on experiencing poetry aloud is crucial, a harkening back to poetry’s most ancient roots. Many readers choose to recite from memory as well, which is another venerable and valuable tradition. Memorization and recitation remind us, as Pinsky has often stressed, that poetry comes alive most when it is experienced physically. Knowing a poem by heart, after all, means that the body is as much involved as the mind.
A second key element is Pinsky’s request that readers say something about why they chose that particular poem. That brilliantly simple stipulation has a number of benefits. It personalizes the discussion; these are not lectures but testimonies. It foregrounds pleasure and inspiration and the relevance of poetry to all realms of life. Thus it demonstrates, without any need to argue the point, that of course Poetry Can Matter, to turn Dana Gioia’s well known question into the statement it deserves to be. It’s heartening to see how many different ways poetry does matter to a broad cross section of the reading public, many of whom are seldom seen at your average poetry reading. It’s good for us poets to rub shoulders with civilians, and see what we have in common. At Favorite Poem events you hear a lot of touching stories of how this poem or that one consoled, troubled, encouraged, challenged, inspired, or otherwise moved ordinary folk in numerous ways. As such the audience is not only transported by the beauty of the poems, but is also removed far from the jealousies, fleeting controversies, one-upsmanship, careerism, and other inbred concerns of the world of PoBiz.
Another thing I love about Favorite Poem readings is that almost always I hear a poem that is new to me, or come to appreciate one I already know in a fresh way. It’s easy to forget, if you mostly read poems silently on page or screen that the ear can in some ways be wiser than the silent mind.
At the reading I attended, this happened to me with the following poem by Anne Porter, a poet I was dimly aware of but whose work I did not really know:
Music
When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother’s piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold
And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying
Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country
I’ve never understood
Why this is so
But there’s an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow
For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest
And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country
We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams
And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows
Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.
--from Living Things. Zoland Books, 2006.
The reader, as it happens, was a musician and composer. He spoke feelingly about the connections he felt with the ideas and the emotions in this poem about music’s power to convey both beauty and desolation. As I listened, I felt these things also, but I was mostly carried away by the quiet and understated music of the language, impressed by Porter’s skill at conveying her theme so potently in words and sentences quite simple and straightforward. I suspect that had my eye run across this poem in a magazine, I would have dismissed it too quickly as obvious and blandly stated. If I’d read the poem silently on the page I might also have been bothered, as a friend was, that the poem plainly echoes, at least in some details of plot and theme, a famous one by D.H. Lawrence, called “Piano.” Instead, I was moved, hearing Porter’s words read aloud by someone who felt them profoundly, by the parallel powers of the poetic and the musical arts, and their ability to suggest things which are beyond words—which as the poem dramatizes, is quite often a bittersweet experience, where beauty can be inextricable with melancholy, longing, and loss.
And what poem did I recite at this event? It was Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” long one of my personal favorites. But since I’ve written about Hayden in a previous column, I’ll end this one with another lyric I cherish, which I’ll probably present at the next Favorite Poem reading that I attend.
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides—
You may have met Him--did you not
His notice sudden is—
The Grass divides as with a Comb—
A spotted shaft is seen—
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on—
He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too cool for Corn—
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot—
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone—
Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me—
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality—
But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone—
Am I afraid of snakes? You bet. I know it’s irrational, but for me that’s the poem’s first appeal, the solidarity I feel with Dickinson in puzzling over this common bit of unreason. But as a poet and long-time teacher, I’m equally in love with her brilliant craft. Dickinson is famous for her intellectual brilliance, of course, her searching honesties and sharp-eyed investigations of spiritual and psychological extremities. She's equally renowned for her poetic eccentricities, including her reliance on dashes as her major punctuation mark and her fondness for capitalizing many nouns, as was fashionable in previous eras of English poetry. But many brilliant and eccentric poets have been lost to historical memory. Why are we still admiring and learning from Dickinson? "In poetry everything is permitted," Chilean poet Nicanor Parra advised young poets, adding as seemingly casual afterthought this stiff qualification: "you have to improve the blank page."
No poet improved a blank page more stunningly than Dickinson at her best. Among her great gifts as poet is the knack for absolutely memorable phrasemaking. Not even Keats can outdo Dickinson in pithy quotability. Perhaps only Shakespeare is her equal. At the most fundamental level I love this lyric for its absolute memorability of phrasing. In fact, it’s not all that hard to memorize, which I know because I’m terrible at memorization and yet have it by heart.
The poem's story is a simple one: a boy comes upon a snake in the weeds and is startled by it; then the poet poses but does not answer the big question: why are people so afraid of snakes, anyway? Even those who love all other of "Nature's People" can be startled into "tighter breathing" by a simple encounter with a common garden snake.
What makes this straightforward lyric a near-perfect poem has much to do with Dickinson's ability to turn a phrase, sketch a scene, craft an image or metaphor. Who could ever forget her snake parting the tall grass "as with a Comb," or the way it "wrinkled and was gone" as the boy-narrator stoops to grab what he thinks is a dropped buggy-whip in the grass? And what a perfect compressed metaphor for a snake is that whip--visually accurate, naturally, but also carrying implications of danger, pain, punishment, shock.
But she saves the most brilliant touch for the final phrase. Wondering about the primal fear many people feel for serpents, which provokes that shocked "tighter breathing," she leaves us to ponder the implications of "Zero at the Bone"--the chill of great fear? a bone-deep metaphysical loneliness? the scary absence of final answers? However one interprets that marvelous concluding phrase, chances are you'll never forget it.
When I first encountered that phrase, well over forty years ago, before I had published a single poem myself, it struck me with a lifelong jolt. As the saying goes, I felt seen. I felt a deep kinship with this strange genius who died long before I was born, but who nonetheless perfectly expressed the bone-deep fear of snakes that I have known since I was myself “a boy, and barefoot.”
©2019 David Graham
Editor's Note: If you enjoyed this article please tell David. His email address is grahamd@ripon.edu. Letting authors know you like their work is the beginning of community at Verse-Virtual.