I’d planned on following yesterday’s post with the good news, but that line about not actually liking poetry feels like a rusty nail—so let’s hammer it down before we move on to “We Are All Poets” later in the week.
First, a caveat: I read and think about poetry all day, but I’m not an academic. I don’t read poetry scholarship, other than to see if anyone else argues for the same opinions as mine, but then usually I get bored and give up looking. I don’t even know what to call “poetry scholarship”; there’s probably some word for it, poesiametalalalology, or something like that, but I don’t know it. I received not one but three review copies of Edward Hirsh’s A Poet’s Glossary—I gave two away at our open mic night, and the hardcover is sitting unopened on my bookshelf, looking stately. All this to say: I don’t know if what I’m about to write is obvious, or redundant, or ignorant. If so, just let me have it in the comments.
The problem of poetry’s place in contemporary American culture is unavoidable, no matter how little you pay attention to the gossip. There’s been a “new” article published on the subject at least once a month for the last two decades, I’m sure. I could link to a few but why bother? Just google “why no one reads poetry” or “only poets read poetry” or “is poetry dead?” and take your pick. There are just as many articles about how these articles about the death of poetry need to die, because look at all these poet laureates, or submissions, or MFA programs, or slams, etc.
Poetry really does have a problem—it isn’t dying, though, just adapting to the destructive forces of modern life, like everything else on the planet. Poetry is the urban coyote of the art world, or maybe an apocalyptic cockroach: It lives a different life now, but it lives and will live on.
For thousands, probably tens of thousands of years, poetry served a very clear and important role as the only way to fix language. Poetry pinned the wings of narrative, and helped oral stories and rituals leap from one generation to the next mostly unaltered. Musical rhythms and repetitions embedded in speech were a matter of life and death—rituals brought the herds and the rains and appeased the gods; stories shared warnings and told of our place in the cosmos. For that reason, I think poetry is, maybe not in our DNA, but a part of our epigenetic heritage, let’s say. And it worked—see the striking similarities in the global flood myths as evidence. Or the universal power of a passionate speech. Poetry matters, and has mattered, for a very long time.
But this use of poetry has also been under assault for a long time—every piece of technology, from the earliest cuneiform texts to the iPhone video camera, has chipped away at poetry’s original source of value, to the point none of that value is left. The idea of using poetry for communication or commemoration is anachronistic, to say the least.
The unindoctrinated, the “people” who don’t (yet) read poetry (as opposed to the “poets” who do) are still stuck with the ancient idea of how poetry is used—and so they find no use for it. Story lives in movies, music in the mp3s, memory in the digital camera. How can poetry compete with any of that?
As almost everyone reading this knows, poetry evolves, and has been evolving for centuries—real modern poetry has very little to do with storytelling or record keeping. Instead, it taps into that subconscious, structural, cognitive, inherited, epigenetic (whatever you want to call it) deep history of human culture—from a nursery rhymes’ role in language acquisition to a liturgical play of emotion—and becomes a brief but direct connection from mind to mind. The art of poetry has evolved into the transformative injection of another’s mental state into your own being.
I’ve used this analogy many times, but another way to put it is that poetry is magic. A poem is a spell, cast—a string of sounds that, when recited correctly, changes consciousness from one position to another. It’s abracadabra hocus pocusing Bugs Bunny into a bat.
I can sense the skepticism from here, 12 hours or days or weeks in the past, so a few examples.
In our contributor notes of our current issue, Deborah P. Kolodji explains why she loves haiku:
The words of Bashō pop into my head—translated by Lucien Stryk, ‘summer grasses/ all that remains/ of a warrior’s dreams’—and I start to cry. The sadness of the earth, the memories of the fallen, and the words of a seventeenth century poet in Japan all come together in a moment of connection. Separated by centuries and thousands of miles, Bashō and I are in the same place. This is why I love haiku.
Just saying those words takes her there, to Bashō’s hut and the grasses, and brings real tears. Poetry can be a mantra, a touchstone. When I’m feeling down, I recite to myself E.E. Cumming’s “Into the Strenuous Briefness”—thinking of the “i do,world” and life as a strenuous briefness, always seems to inspire a strangely joyous resolve.
Poetry does this in many ways, though, and it’s always through voice—poetry is the music of speech, but is unique in that the reader is the artist’s instrument. When I read a poem by Robert Frost—even silently to myself—it’s Frost regulating my own breath like a conductor from the grave. When I read a poem about an experience that I don’t know, or maybe even can’t know, suddenly I can, in a way that would never be conveyed outside of art, and never as directly as through the art of poetry.
My favorite feature we at Rattle is probably Poets Respond, where we publish a poem every Sunday morning about the news. Every week I read a hundred often powerful reactions to the world around us.
As a white man, I have no idea what it’s like—what it really feels like—to be a Muslim woman on the campus of NCSU the day after three other Muslim students were shot. I have no idea what it’s like to be a black man and watch the video of Walter Scott shot in the back. Or to be a mother after the Michael Brown court decision. Just as you don’t know what it’s like to be a 30-something guy reading 250 poems a day and then writing this blog post at 1AM. But maybe you would, for a moment, if I wrote a great poem about it … When I read those poems, I'm given a new experience and am changed.
The reason why I don’t like most poetry is that I’m only interested in this magic. I don’t care about sound or metaphor or beauty or wit, or any of those elements, unless they work in the service of the magic of the poem. All else is exercise. All else is masturbation. If a poem isn’t transformative, then it has no use for me—and I don’t know why it would have a use for any modern audience.
Transformation is hard, though, and most of even what’s published doesn’t really work. Magic is magical; it’s mysterious. An incantation can fail for the slightest and most indeterminate of reasons. Moreover, it’s subjective—we all know art is subjective, but this is why it’s subjective. Even the best of spells won’t work on every demon—but that doesn’t mean we should stop casting them, or exposing their power to those who haven’t experienced the magic yet.
So I don’t like most poetry—and I’m sure, if you were being honest, you’d say you don’t like most poetry either. We can admit it; it’s all right.
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[Photo by plaisanter~, CC-BY-SA, Magic No Mystery: Conjuring Tricks with Cards, Balls, and Dice, Magic Writing, Performing Animals, W.H. (William Henry) Cremer, 1876. Not in copyright, link]
