FALL IN LOVE WITH A POEM TODAY!



"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either." ~
Robert Graves



Monday, March 21, 2011

Love Letter to a Poetryphobe

I know.  I know.  You can think of a thousand things you'd rather do than read or listen to poems.  Your eyes glaze over and you realize you could use a nap.  Now.

Or you find yourself heading into an anxiety flashback, to the day your Seventh Grade teacher called on you to recite a long poem that made no sense.  Probably still doesn't.  You had a week to memorize it.  Hands clammy, face flushed with shame, you made your way to the front of the classroom.  Never again.

Easy...deep breaths.  Nobody's asking you to memorize or perform today.  You don't need to interpret or analyze a poem for a passing grade.   You don't have to do anything here.   As one of my all-time favorite poets, Mary Oliver, says in Wild Geese (in New and Selected Poems):
                           
                               You do not have to be good.
                               You do not have to walk on your knees
                                for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
                           
There's great comfort for me in that.  Mary Oliver's poems are so earthy and so real,  accessible to even the least academic among us.  That's one of many things that endear her to me.  She meets me where I live every time.  I always feel things when I read a Mary Oliver poem.  And I don't ruin those feelings by grilling myself on what she must have meant by this or that.  I do pause to marvel at some of her perfectly simple, perfectly perfect words.  I believe you would, too.  It's really hard to write with her precision and make it look easy.  

You would have a hard time not liking the rest of Wild Geese.   If you like it, I'll bet you'd also enjoy Ms. Oliver's The Ponds, The Sun, Alligator Poem, and The Journey.  You're bound to like something about all of them.  And you needn't know what the "something" is.  You only have to read it.  Prowl around freely in Mary Oliver's work and see what your own "soft animal" loves.

I was delighted by something A. E. Houseman said about poetry and meaning:  "Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out....Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure."    And pleasure is what most poetry offers.   Why would we want to spoil that pleasure by struggling to find a message?  It's a poem, not a fortune cookie.  If it speaks to you, you will get your "message" and you don't need to worry about whether it's "the" message!

In addition to pleasure, poems offer us opportunities to feel empathy and hope and pain and connection.  And so many other things you will discover for yourself.  But we don't have to identify those things or analyze them.  Unless we want to do that.  For me, experiencing a poem is enough. Experiencing a poem is giving myself to it by opening my heart and mind and suspending judgment.  I surrender to the poem and allow it to take me wherever it's going.

I like some poems better than others; some don't appeal to me at all.  Just as certain foods, films, and works of art are especially captivating, some poems reach out and grab me by the heart or the throat.  And they become favorites.  This can happen only when we don't freeze like a rabbit in fear of "getting it wrong."  There is no way to get it wrong if it moves you in any way at all.  If it makes you smile.  Or nod in agreement or feel a pang of sorrow or a flash of anger.    Or if you like the sounds it makes when you read it aloud or you like the way the poem moves, its rhythm.  Whatever you take from any poetry experience is enough.  Enough!

Bet you'd enjoy Pablo Neruda's "Ode to my Socks" and Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish," too.
If you decide to give them a read, come back and let me know how you liked them, would you?

Meanwhile, I will post a few poems of my own. 

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII




















                     

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

                                    You

          If from a mist over some foreign sea
            you spiral your Self into being,
            or in a field of daisies dance into life
            on the four leaves of a green clover
            or come from the bones of a great silver fish
            or as a raindrop falling
            on a place long rainless,
            whether you appear as liquid light
            in the eyes of an old man
            or emerge from a deep river bed,
            red clay kissing your fingers,
            whether from a mother’s soft belly
            or the belly of a huge round ship,
            I would know you
                though I might not read the text of your face
            I would surely know you.
   
            If in centuries beyond this time
            you take birth
                whatever body, whatever circumstance,
                whether in this place or far away,
                through a door hidden altogether from me,
            I will know you are here         or there,
            back
                beyond names, beyond language,
                beyond the shadows of reason.
   
            I will know
                and once again my heart will be glad
                you are.     
                            Fantasy

            Sometimes I’m consumed 
            with excitement
            sometimes with fear
            at the thought
            you might appear
            on my doorstep
                        whisk me away


                        to Paris
                        or Bali
                        or
                        the Days Inn across town


           on your lunch break
           with soggy sandwiches
           in a brown bag.





"Fantasy" was first published in Petigru Review.