Why You Should Read Poetry...Yes, Poetry
In May of 1944, the poet Anna Akhmatova gave a reading at the Polytechnic Museum, the largest auditorium in Moscow. It was her first appearance in the city since World War II, and the room was packed. The poems she read had rallied Russians throughout the war, and her voice had broadcast through the streets of Leningrad to steel the city to the approaching German Army. When she finally closed her books, she received such thunderous applause that Joseph Stalin asked who'd organized the ovation. The man knew power when he saw it.
If you grew up in America, it might surprise you to learn that a poet has ever had that sort of impact. Poetry here is best known for the simple, sentimental verses found in Hallmark cards and the lyrics of pop music. The word "poet" probably calls to mind some weirdo in a beret. And poetry's power to influence American politics is, at best, a fizzle--if you heard anything about the anti-Bush anthology Poets Against the War, then you listen to a lot of NPR. The truth is most Americans have lost touch with the best of what poetry is: a record of some of civilization's greatest writers--and wisest people--taking on the questions and emotions that define us.
Certainly, the world has changed a lot since Akhmatova. Time once devoted to reading books now goes to TV, movies, and the Internet. When people do read, most prefer to pick up something they can relax with like John Patterson or Augusten Burroughs. But one only needs to look down the aisles of inspirational books at Barnes and Noble to know that the search for meaning that has always driven the great poems still resonates. Classic themes like love, despair, life, death, and hope still infatuate us. Heck, you can find them all in one episode of "Grey's Anatomy." Yet the poems of faith John Milton wrote after he'd gone completely blind, the atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley's passionate explorations of a godless world, and Sylvia Plath's struggle just to hold her world together all go under-appreciated and under-read.
So why aren't we reading poetry? Here are some reasons I often hear that will probably sound familiar. Here, too, are some reasons to reconsider.
Reason 1: I've never understood it.
Poetry can be difficult. Learning to read Shakespeare is difficult, and I certainly wouldn't recommend anyone take on T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" without some guidance. But most poets are far more accessible than Eliot or Shakespeare. Also, it's important to note that your expectations for a poem should be different from your expectations for, say, a newspaper or a novel. A poem often has multiple layers of meaning that will unfold over a few readings--and it's important to give a poem that opportunity. It's a good idea to read a poem more than once in a sitting or go back and reread it over the course of a few weeks or even a lifetime. Remember that the process of exploring a great poem should be part of the reward. As Walt Whitman asked in "Song of Myself":
"Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? Have you reckon'd the Earth much?
Have you practic'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?"
Reason 2: I can't get past the whole rhyming thing.
Rhyming verse can fall a little hard on the modern ear, which is why most contemporary poems are written in "free verse" with no set meter or rhyme scheme. Rhymes are a part of poetry's music: the rhythms and sounds of words from which a poet draws power. Like a great soloist or orator, a poet with a good ear can infuse what he's saying with emotion and immediacy. If you're reading a poem with end rhymes and they're bothering you, ignore the line breaks and try reading the poem as if it's prose.
Reason 3: Poetry is for angst-ridden teens, hopeless romantics and the aforementioned weirdos in berets.
Sure, you run into a few aspiring poets at your local coffee shop that fit this bill, but I guarantee you couldn't pick a practicing poet off the street. We're surprisingly normal. Just like you, we're obsessed with things like fantasy football and I Love New York 2. I was on track to be a doctor before I stumbled on poetry (yes, my parents were real happy about that one). That's not to say that your experience with poetry will be as all-consuming as mine, but for all that poetry has given me, I have no doubt that it has something to give you.
So how should you begin? I'd recommend you start with an anthology. You can't go wrong with the Norton Anthology of Poetry, which covers everything from medieval English verse to Bob Dylan. When you find a poet you like, buy a book of his or her work. Volumes of poetry aren't as daunting as the word "volume" implies. In fact, they're relatively small. And you can read through most poems in a fraction of the time it takes to finish a Sudoku. You should also check here each week, where I'll be posting a great poem as a blog. Think of it as a weekly cultural aperitif.
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Charles Bukowski.
i second the motion.
"...there's nothing uglier
than four men in a car."
counselor...my goblet is empty...
Poetry is hard in this ADD age. A quick sitcom or manic surfing on the web is more stimulating.
Maybe I need to cut back on the caffeine!
"Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night."
Every morn to be at ease
Some are born to cut the cheese.
PROMETHEUS
What about the missile, man?
What about the missile man
With his computerized brain
And his atomized heart?
He’s not civilized! My Lord no!
Lord knows.
Lord knows man
Has gone from bad to worse
Now he pushes buttons with a curse.
Long ago the logical Greek
Felled his enemies with stones
That cracked heads open.
Can’t say they shirked war’s work
The way we do to-day.
Lazy modern man killing or curing with buttons –
Afraid of the blood, sweat and tears
Of the hands on experience of war.
Oh he’s a beast with his fingers on
The buttoned down collar of his shirt;
Perma depressed by the fear
Of his button that he feels pressing upon him.
Gutless modern missile man.
Give me the good old days when
War was child’s play and men were men
Not atomized, sterilized Pandoras
Playing with a button box.
Sing in me, O muse
tell me the rage of Peleus' son
--Homer
I didn't know Bart and Lisa's dad was so eloquent!
PROMETHEUS
What about the missile, man?
What about the missile man
With his computerized brain
And his atomized heart?
He’s not civilized! My Lord no!
Lord knows.
Lord knows man
Has gone from bad to worse
Now he pushes buttons with a curse.
Long ago the logical Greek
Felled his enemies with stones
That cracked heads open.
Can’t say they shirked war’s work
The way we do to-day.
Lazy modern man killing or curing with buttons –
DEAR PLATO
I’ll gather wool and card my thoughts
And spin out a thread to weave
Into a dream world where lambs don’t
Grow up to be fleeced by men.
Then I’ll wrap myself in the warmth of dreams
For the world is too cold for naked man.
He must either sheer sheep or gather wool
While sitting by a fire and watching
Shadows on the wall.
I love this thread. It is so good to see people sharing their favorite poems with others on this blog.
Ariana, why not make this a regular feature and allow us to contribute some of our own verse?
Thank you John Lundberg for inspiring this.
I am so very glad that Mr. Lundberg will be joinging the HUFPO. I have a great interest in poetry and finally a little culture!!!
Forgetfulness
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Billy Collins
To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.
Jorge Luis Borges - The Art of Poetry
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
'Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.'
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
'The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.'
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.
A. E. Housman (1859-1936)
(from A Shropshire Lad)
Dulce et Decorum est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen
Yes! Maybe the greatest antiwar poem ever written. By one who died in the Great War.
I write antiwar poetry myself, but nobody reads it. I have a poem I would like to have set to music and can't find anybody who writes music and hates war enough to help me out. It's a strange world we live in.
Thanks for the read. I opened up William Blake the other day for the first time in several years & instantly lost myself in some amazing random description. What a relief!
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