An essay by Sidney Hall Jr.
We live in an exciting, intellectually stimulating time, and a time of the most profound sadness and basic ignorance.
William Carlos Williams said in a poem:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
The best poems are like lightning flashes that, for a split second, light up our ignorance. These flashes can also light the way to ideas that come uncomfortably close to being solutions to our most entrenched and cherished crises.
Future generations will come to see that poetry was too truthful for an age desperately clinging to hopeful illusions. Sensing the threat posed by poetry, our teachers and our institutions have conspired to keep poetry under wraps. Until recently, they did this by convincing each other and all of us that poetry is something esoteric, something that almost requires a professor in the same room with you when you are reading it. The fact that some modern poets wrote difficult poems gave them the permission they needed to isolate poetry from the common experience of the human race.
To add insult to injury, we are surrounded everywhere by the little poems of Madison Avenue and the Pentagon, the poems the forces of ignorance fabricate and then disguise, the poems that lie to us and keep us down, that keep us from turning to the poems where truth and goodness are obvious, and possibly even attractive.
Of course, poetry does not really offer concrete ideas to help us put an end to our crises. As Sir Philip Sidney said, "The poet affirmeth nothing." Very few poems have managed to be didactic and memorable at the same time. What poetry offers is a vision of things as they are, or might be, without delusions. It shows us life as anti-advertisement, as itself. This may be the first step to resolving dilemmas.
But then poetry goes on to reconnect us to humanity and to the deepest and best parts of ourselves. Poetry gives meaning where there seemed before to be none, and meaning is the will to change.
Poetry need not be portentous to change our lives. Any child who has grown up on a steady diet of Mother Goose is much better prepared for life because of it, more able to set the rhythms of his life in order and choose the sound he will make during his life.
Before art can change our lives, we need to enjoy it. We've come so far from thinking of poetry as something to enjoy that we may need to rip it back down to the basics, and throw away all the abstractions.
It should be remembered that poetry and poems are not the same thing. Poetry is in the world around us everywhere, ready to be found and ready to be made in an infinite number of ways. In daily life, everyone is a poet. A poem is just a highly condensed form of poetry that uses words as its vehicle. It's the fact that it uses words that gets in our way. We've lost our sense of a simple relationship to these words.
We don't have any trouble with words in newspapers, or words in short stories and novels, or words in conversation. But put them in a poem, and many people are knocked off course. They tell themselves they can never understand these words, let alone enjoy them.
I'd like to offer some tongue-in-cheek guidelines that might help us feel less intimidated by poetry. So far here, I've made very high claims for poetry and its importance to us. Now I'm going to make some very low claims about how easy it is to read a poem.
The first step is to pick up a poem. We needn't worry about why we pick it up. Perhaps the subject is what draws us to it. Perhaps the title has pulled us in, like the cover on a well-made book. Perhaps it's our curiosity about a famous author. Oddly enough, it seems fame is often a better guide to poetry that hits us hard, than subject matter is. Fame is an acid test. But who cares? If you want to read a poem, the important thing is to have a poem in your hands.
Begin on the left end of the first line and continue across, seeing the words all the way to the right hand end of the line. If the poem we are reading is in English-or any other language we understand-each word our eyes encounter as we pass across the page registers some meaning and some sensation to the brain. This is called reading! But with poems, we have to make sure-at all cost-that we are not speed reading or reading merely visually. We need to both see and hear these words. There must be a voice sounding in our ears, real or imagined.
When we reach the end of the first line, we can take a look at what kind of punctuation is there. We've already paused, at least mentally, if not physically, because we came to the end of a line, and it seemed the natural thing to do. If there is a period there, pause a little longer. If there is a comma, or semicolon, pause appropriately and go on to the next line. If there is no punctuation, go on as if nothing at all happened. Of course, we know something did, because the sentence was simply lopped off at a certain point. There's a reason for this that the poet, if he is lucky, will know himself, but why worry about it? That's his business. Poems have wide margins. The reader needs only marginal intelligence.
We've brought our eyes back to the beginning of the next line, without skipping over any lines. We continue registering words and sounds into the brain and ear as we go across the page. This isn't difficult if we've never had the terrible misfortune of learning how to speed read. In that case, you just have to force yourself to slow down. You might pretend there is someone in the room talking to you. Every poem has to be read out loud, even if you don't open your mouth.
We continue in a downward direction on the page, until everything comes to a stop. This always happens either near the top, near the middle or near the bottom of the page, or on a succeeding page.
When you come to a stanza break, you should move right on to the next stanza as though it were the end of a line. A stanza break makes a bigger impression than a line break. We either feel the rightness of it, or else we're completely surprised by it. Either way, just keep going. When we feel something happening in a good poem, it's supposed to be happening. Whatever you do, don't stop and think about it. When you're riding a motorcycle, think about the road. Don't look down and wonder how they created such an incredible machine.
All the time we're reading, these words are making an impression. But more importantly, they are making a sound. We have to hear the sound. The words might make sense or not make sense. That's not important. You can go lots of other places to get sense. You'd resent it, if a poet suddenly got interested in making too much sense. In fact, a good poem should make as much sound and as little sense as possible.
We reach the end. That's a good place to stop, and go find something else to do. If we want, we're free to read the poem again, and we're free not to. There are no poetry police. The poem has had its effect already. Either we know this profoundly or we don't know it at all. If it left us cold, it may be the author's fault, or it may be the mood we were in, or it may be our ignorance getting in the way. Who really cares? Important words and sounds have their own way of getting to us, and don't care much about the way we feel about them.
Above all, never, never ask yourself or anyone else what a poem means! That would be like asking someone what a tree means, or a house, or a marble, or what "Obla Dee, Obla Dah" means, or "April is the cruelest month," or "Baa, baa, black sheep." These things get into our lives without us ever asking what they mean.
A poem that is well made and that hits us at the right time will do what Emily Dickinson said a poem should do: It will make you feel as though the top of your head was taken right off. It would be demeaning to our experience of the poem and to the poem itself to try to translate it into prose in order to make it more accessible. It won't make it more. It will make it less. You might as well try to translate a rose or a spouse into a prose paraphrase. Or death, or a wink. It won't help.
Poetry is physical, in every sense of the word. The creation of poetry is the poet's response to the body. The reading of poetry should be the body's response to the poet. In other words, it is a natural act, not artificial. It has a closer kinship to playing baseball or playing with marbles than it does with studying Schopenhauer, or astronomy or linguistics, even though all of these subjects can and should find their way into poetry. Poetry is the body speaking, and sometimes it chooses a method that tricks us into thinking it is really words that are speaking.
Poetry is not only physical in its origin, it is also a new physical object. A good poem is one we can come back to many times during our lives. The Greek word poesis means a "making," or a "doing." A poem is a made object that is there to be used, whenever we want it. A poem is a marble. It's beautiful to look at and doesn't need anything else to complete itself. It feels good in your hand. It's fun to roll across a rug or a floor. Whether it's clear, rainbow-colored, or pitch black, it's equally beautiful and usable in a game of marbles. It's mysterious in its creation, amazing if you look closely. It's collectable, and it's permanent.
Of course, words do have meanings, and it does help to know what they mean when we're reading them. A dictionary is handy. But the beauty of poetry is that it is, in a sense, the best place to learn what words mean. The life work of every poet is the creation of his own new dictionary, and these dictionaries are not only the most authoritative, but also the most lively. Give yourself to the poet and his meaning. Make yourself passive, and get your own brain far out of the way. As Howard Nemerov said, "A poem is not so much a thought, as it is a mind." Expose yourself to this mind. In fact, a poem is not so much a mind as it is a body. A poem is like another body in the room with you, when only the subtleties of body language are being passed back and forth.
There is a complex way the poem gets to be a body. It takes a writer years of labor and thought to concentrate the result of a good poem. The poet has to join a comprehensive and realistic perception of the world with his own hard-won literary skills to bring the poem to a point where we can view it as object, without thinking about the artist. We don't need to understand his agonies to know when a line of poetry rings true.
We don't need to know what a metaphor is, to be surprised by Emily Dickinson's line: My life had stood--a Loaded Gun--. Tagging a certain usage an oxymoron doesn't help us feel any more deeply a phrase from Walt Whitman: the sweet hell within.
When Frost's poem says: I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend, you feel yourself swaying on the ladder even if you don't know this effect is partly achieved by the insertion of a so-called pyrrhic foot into a line of iambic pentameter. Frost didn't need us to know that. He only wanted us to feel the ladder sway. Irony, by any other name, would still be irony. Even a rhyme would still be a rhyme if we didn't call it one.
It doesn't help to know that some poetry is complex. It does help to know that our lives are already immersed in poetry no matter what we do. My eight year old daughter is well versed in poetry, having grown up with Mother Goose and jump ropes. I'd feel terrible if someone let a college professor get into the playground to teach her the right way, or a possible way, to understand her jump rope verses.
I've had a jump rope verse going through my head for years. It goes:
Intry mintry cutry corn
Apple seed and apple thorn,
Wire briar limber lock,
Three geese in a flock,
One flew east and one flew west
And one flew over the cuckoo's nest.
Looking back, I see that this little sound running in my ears has helped give meaning and music and a helpful rhythm to my life, and yet, oddly, I've never once stopped to think of what it means, or why these particular words should be put together in this particular way.
The fact is, we all are full of poems that have become the rhythm, the sound and the meaning of our lives. They will continue to have this meaning, if we only don't stop to try to see their meaning.
Take back your right to enjoy poetry. The fact that some poetry is harder to understand than other poetry just begs the question. Some flowers are harder to appreciate than others. Who's going to tell you to stop looking at flowers unless you have a naturalist on your elbow?
Poetry is as common as flowers, as friendship, as loss, as evil, as good. At the most crucial or difficult times in our lives, we always turn to poetry. Funerals are pure poetry. But why wait for a funeral? Every poem is a made object that is very inexpensive and there for the taking. Take back your right to it! Surround yourself with these made objects. Devote a bookshelf to them. Best of all, keep a small store of them in your memory, to enjoy any time and any place. Let the ones that speak truth to you survive and let the rest become extinct. If you and I don't take advantage of this basic human privilege and pleasure, the little poems that speak lies to us will be the only ones to survive, and the ones that offer us hope will become extinct.
Copyright 1994 by Sidney Hall, Jr.
This essay may be printed and used for educational purposes, as long as the title and author's name and copyright notice appear with it.