Poetry. Who needs it?

 "The enduring human need for poetry . . . its ancient task of teaching and consoling humanity." 

So said Dana Gioia in his essay on September 11. The human need for poetry. Why do we need it? What does it give us? The first thing I thought of was a former voice teacher; he was trying to get us, his wooden freshmen students, to understand our motivation for breaking out into song. Why not just speak the words? he asked. We were intimidated freshmen and had no answer. He said we sing when words will no longer adequately express our situation, when the emotion or situation is so strong that mere everyday conversational prose just won't handle it. Or something like that. Basically, when words fail, we sing. 

And I think the same is true of poems. Lines of poetry come to us when cliches fail and everything we try to say sounds like something on a Hallmark card. There's a certain relief in finding words that perfectly fit the situation. Strangely enough, the place I see this relief the most is on facebook - you know, the teenage girls who post those Taylor Swift song lyrics to express the anguish of unrequited puppy love  or how alone in the world they are (I was one of those girls once. Only my medium was xanga. I blush). And there's something to it. It's a lot more satisfying to type some poignant lyrics into that little box than to simply post "Anna is feeling down." 

And that's the need poetry fills in our lives - it expresses what we cannot express; it comes the closest to articulating what is beyond words. 

For example, have you ever lost someone you loved, but life is too busy to grieve and the tears won't come but then they do and you're glad, actually glad, to be crying? Well. Wendell Berry does. 

Early in the morning, walking

in a garden in Vancouver

three thousand miles from your grave,

the sky dripping, song

sparrows singing in the borders,

I come suddenly upon 

a Japanese dogwood, a tree

you loved, bowed down with bloom.

By what blessedness do I weep?

-From Sabbath Poems

Openings: a rant

This post is for all those people who hate poetry because of a really bad English teacher who insisted on a certain reading. As in, you were dead-wrong if you didn't say exactly what Mrs. Grimkin wanted. And she wore odd-smelling hair nets and you're still bitter about 10th grade.

I want you to know: I am so sorry (if it makes you feel better, English has gone the opposite direction now. Did you know there are Marxist overtones in "The Raven"? Yeah, I didn't either). I used to hate poems too, and it wasn't even on account of a horrible teacher. I just plain didn't understand the darn things. Ugh. Boy, did I hate poetry. Until.

Until, until, until.

I had eleventh grade English with Mr. C. He gave us a list of poets, and our assignment was to go immerse ourself in the work of one of them and then: write a poem. In the poet's style. To make it worse? They were contemporary poets. My sixteen year old self moped around in sullen anguish over this poem thing. I picked up a book by Jane Kenyon and scribbled down some lines. And you know what? My teacher liked it (or acted like he did . . .) and suddenly, I was in love with poem-writing and reading, and all because of a highly generous and encouraging teacher.

My main point is that I fell in deep deep love with poetry because my teacher was more concerned that we enjoy it than that we figure out what everything meant. It wasn't "Ok, read the poem and figure out what it means," it was "Read the poem and listen to the way it sounds, notice the images, what the poem is doing." And suddenly poetry was a source of pleasure, not pain.

All that to say: we - you and I, American readers - have been sinned against mightily, from two fronts. The first is the horde of aforementioned Mrs. Grimkins who approached poems as problems to be solved, not a work to be appreciated. The second are the poets of academia who gave up trying to communicate with the American public. Bad academics! Not that they didn't do wonderful stuff, now. But poetry acquired this esoteric, ivory tower, unimportant to real life reputation.

It wasn't always this way. Wordsworth and Byron were immensely popular, and everyone read Tennyson and Longfellow. And remember Robert Frost?

So, in the deep conviction that poetry should be read by all types of people, read this poem by Billy Collins while I step down off my soapbox.

Today

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,

well, today is just that kind of day.