The thing about poetry is that I truly don’t know how
to write it. I love poetry, I read a lot of it, but when I write it, is it
real? Is it actually poetry? My mother cut this out of the paper for me a while
ago:
“Poetry is awareness
heightened to the point of love,” Mr. [Paul] Roche wrote in 1970 in an essay
for the reference work “Contemporary Poets.” “It is a way of apprehending the
intensity of being. I try to recreate experience more intensely, reduce it to a
luminous whole, render intuitive the meaning and metaphysics of the universe
and so feed myself and others with the kernel of being.”
Quite a bit of hooey isn’t it? And yet…
I don’t know why some poetry works and some poetry doesn’t.
I don’t know why I read highly acclaimed poetry and find it so enigmatic that I
can’t, just, can’t. While other
poetry, equally enigmatic, is thrilling. I think it is about heightened senses.
Mr. Roche up there was quite the hedonist – apparently calling himself a satyr
– and in that passage above, the “awareness
heightened to the point of love” and “intensity
of being” is possibly about poetry =orgasm.
It’s a burst (to push this metaphor beyond taste) of reality, pure and
completely in the moment. Well, some of it is. Some is epic. Some poetry is about
story, truth or language.
I’m reading the Mark Strand/Eavan Boland book, The Making of a Poem, * and in the first
chapter “Verse Forms,” they write, “ Verse forms do not define poetic form:
they simply express it…poetic form is not abstract, but human…To understand
them fully it is necessary to see how distinct their histories are…And this
distinction in turn is the reason that each poetic form has been rediscovered”
(3). They go on to say that the sonnet hasn’t had the same resurgence in
contemporary poetry as the villanelle because today’s poets like the way a
villanelle refrain can shift from light to dark, something that speaks to the
overall voice of poetry today. “This is the charm and power of poetic form,”
Strand and Boland say, “It is not imposed; it is rooted.”
This may seem really obvious but rootedness is why I think
some poems speak to me while others don’t. A poem has to take hold of me with a
long tendril that may take root in my ear, but grow through brain and blood and
finally set up in my heart. It has to be something that is reminiscent of
something I understand almost bodily, as opposed to intellectually. The
“meaning and metaphysics” of my universe.
In the preface to The Making of a Poem,
Boland writes that Blake’s poem, The
Tyger had a particularly strong effect on her as a child because she first
encountered it when her father read it to her. But not only that; when her
father read it to her she was instantly transported to the summer earlier when
she was separated from her father at the zoo and while searching for him ran
past the pens of the lions and tigers. She was finally found when she heard her
father calling for her using a stern almost angry voice. The same voice he used
while reading Blake’s poem. Suddenly for Boland, there was a connection, “Form
waited for me: waited for more than a hundred years on that page. Waited in
cold print and cool and changing paper shapes. Waited to find the child, rather
than the other way around.”
“Waited to find the child” – it’s metaphysical – but I do
think there is that aspect of a poem lying in wait to find me. It’s crouching
there, ready to spring in the perfect moment, that moment when past experience
and present reading of the poem merge – no more than merge – recreate
experience. And I’m back to Roche:
“Poetry is awareness
heightened to the point of love … It is a way of apprehending the intensity of
being. I try to recreate experience more intensely, reduce it to a luminous
whole, render intuitive the meaning and metaphysics of the universe and so feed
myself and others with the kernel of being.”
Without my own past, there is no poem. Without my experience
of the world right now, there is no poem and even, at least according to Boland
and Strand, no connection to form either.
I’m not sure I’m any closer to understanding poetry today,
or even how to write poetry. The only way for me to understand anything is to
read and then write about what I’ve just read – and I hope that my
understanding of how poetry was/is written will increase this way.
* Strand, Mark and Eavan Boland. The Making of A Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. Print.
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