paean to the poets, and to those who planted poetry’s seeds in us
in the house where i grew up, poetry was never far away. poetry was my mother’s native language. she awoke us with it. and recited it when we were sick in bed. she spoke of emily and hopkins as if both were neighbors down the lane who’d saunter by for tea and verse. amid especially harried afternoons, when the quintet of us were driving her mad, she’d tuck herself away in the living room and declare it off limits as she lit her rare cigarette, and cracked open a tome of poem after poem. indeterminate time later, she emerged resuscitated—by rhyme scheme or distance away from us, we never did discern (nor did it matter to us dare-not-trespass peepers who kept close and curious watch through the crack of the kitchen door).
most memorable of all perhaps (at least to my wee mind), was the occasional sunday morning recitation of lines i’ve long since etched into my heart’s smooth fibers. while missing sunday mass was never an option, the renegade in my mother was known to let loose sotto voce emily D’s rebellious defense of liturgical absence: “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – / I keep it, staying at Home – / With a Bobolink for a Chorister – / And an Orchard, for a Dome —”
so much of who my mother is is captured in those twenty-five words. therein lies the supernatural capacity of any poem that echoes across the landscape of our lives.
and yet, never did i imagine that grown-up me would so embrace my mother’s poetic passion. in a house where words and wit were play things, and my father’s witticisms kept us on our toes, it seems my mother’s way with words is the one that snuck in sideways. and stuck firmly to my ribs. to this day, it shakes me to my rafters.
i am drawn to the ineffable, the liminal, the say-it-slant; i am drawn to the knowing that fills in the silence, the epiphany barely glimpsed in passing. i ache to grasp the depths and heights that crowd the wordless void.
or, as my muse maria popova once wrote: “language is not the content of thought but the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking, afloat on the current of feeling and time. when the vessel becomes too small to hold what we pour into it, language spills into poetry. in this respect, poetry serves the same function as prayer: to give shape and voice to our unspoken and often unspeakable hopes, fears, and inner tremblings — the tenderest substance of our lives, to be held between the palms and passed from hand to compassionate hand.”
as the hallmarkian labeling of april as poetry month* (see below) is all but wrapped for the year, i thought i’d plop a few poetic musings here on the make-believe maple table, all snipped from my commonplace source, as a way of holding poets, poetry, and poetics up to the flickering light.
this, then, is my ode to the awe and wonder that propels each and every line of poetry, and its power to catapult us into that which cannot be contained in any string of prose. herewith, a litany of poets (and a rare scholar) on the great work and mystery of poetry:
jane hirshfield: “Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.”
billy collins: “all babies are born with knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. then, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us.”
robert ultimo, a classics scholar who has taught the art and science of writing for the last quarter century, and now twice weekly sends brilliant missives via his Writing Smartly blog, put it pithily: “Prose wants to describe the husk, but poetry wants the seed.”
ralph waldo emerson: “For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.”
marie howe: “poetry holds . . . what can’t be said. It can’t be paraphrased. It can’t be translated. The great poetry I love holds the mystery of on being alive. It holds it in a kind of basket of words that feels inevitable. There’s great, great, great prose, gorgeous prose. You and I could probably quote some right now. Poetry has a kind of trancelike quality still. It has the quality of a spell still.
“I mean, maybe the first poem was a lullaby a woman sang to her child, the incantatory, “Everything is OK, everything is OK, everything is OK. I’m here, go to sleep.” Or we prayed for rain, or we thanked the Gods for the corn, or we sang to the deer we were going to catch. But it’s interrelational. It’s incantatory. It feels as if its roots can never wholly be pulled out from sacred ground.”
t.s. eliot: “the great poet . . . should perceive vibrations beyond the range of ordinary men [and women], and be able to make [them] see and hear more at each end than they could ever see without [the poet’s] help. … It is therefore a constant reminder to the poet, of the obligation to explore, to find words for the inarticulate, to capture those feelings which people can hardly even feel, because they have no words for them; and at the same time, a reminder that the explorer beyond the frontiers of ordinary consciousness will only be able to return and report to his fellow-citizens, if he has all the time a firm grasp upon the realities with which they are already acquainted…
“The task of the poet, in making people comprehend the incomprehensible, demands immense resources of language; and in developing the language, enriching the meaning of words and showing how much words can do, he is making possible a range of emotion and perception for other men, because he gives them the speech in which more can be expressed.”
eavan boland, the great Irish poet, once said: “Poetry begins where certitude leaves off.”
and let us close with christian wiman, who gets the last but not final word: “Let us remember … that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.”
are you inclined to poetry, or are you more cozy inside prose? either way, who sparked the earliest such seeds in you, and when do you first remember them sprouting?
*about that poetic designation: should you be even a tad curious about how it is that the fourth month of the gregorian calendar found itself with the appellation national poetry month, the chair comes lurching to the rescue: twas the decision in 1996 of the academy of american poets who chose it for a host of reasons, not least being a poetic bit of playful towel-snapping contra to t.s. eliot’s claim that “april is the cruellest month.” pragmatically, the pedagogues among the poets decided the penultimate month of the school year was the perfect period to pack in piles and piles of poems. and should you be even remotely curious about which poem snares the title as most-read (at least in modern times), it’s claimed to be the ode to daffodils from ol’ will wordsworth, who, out wandering “lonely as a cloud” with his little sister dorothy in april of 1802, came upon a belt of yellow-bellied bloomers. exclaimed, he did:
“I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils.”
perhaps you have another that you’d consider your very own personal most-read poem . . . (all contenders welcome!)
pull up a chair 