Let’s
Stop Saying, “I Don’t Like Poetry”
When
I was taking my first poetry class as an adult,
I was surprised when UCLA poetry icon Suzanne Lummis
sashayed into our classroom and said, “Good
evening, Poets!” It seemed overblown. Arrogant…even
foreign. “Poet” as a title seemed a
little high falutin’-- something we humble
students should presume to be. Ad I am a person
who believes attitude is everything. When it comes
to poetry, too many of us harbor attitudes much
like mine. Therefore, they say something like “I
don’t like poetry,” because it’s
easier than even supposing that one might get off
one’s duff and learn to like it! Or giving
it enough consideration to realize the statement
is a little like saying “I hate Picasso”
when they don’t know enough about his work
to know the man painted in several styles. Sooo,
do they hate his “blue period” or “cubist”
period. Do they hate both of those styles, one of
them, or everything in between? Really?
So, two things happened recently that caused me
start writing about poetry. First, a reviewer told
me that my poetry is “beautiful: and then
went on to say she “didn’t understand
much of it.” That’s like saying not
much of anything in the literary world. What would
the point of writing something with vocabulary or
structure or anything else that everyone understood?
Where would the fun be in that? Is that our expectation
when we pick up a The New York Times--that we will
understand everything. Maybe we will, but only after
many years of training in reading, vocabulary building,
attention to topics usually covered like politics
and on and on.
The
second thing that happened, a slender book (or booklet)
known as a chapbook found its way into my hands.
Words
and Bones is a lovely book of poetry published
by Finishing
Line Press that specializes in slender books
of poetry—one of mine from more than ten years
ago, in fact. This one is written by LB Sedlacek
and she writes poetry uniquely suited to show people
who don’t know much about poetry how to tackle
the process of
“understanding” it better—or at
least how to better appreciate what they don’t
(yet) understand.
I am parroting Clinton’s political campaign,
“It’s the line breaks, stupid.”
They throw us for a loop. We think we have to pause
when we see that break, even when there is no punctuation
there that tells us to do so. In fact, there is
a whole school of poetry by a former US laureate
of poetry. Philip Levine was instrumental in molding
it into what he called the Fresno School of Poetry.
Doesn’t sound fancy, does it?
And it isn’t. It’s almost journalistic.
It feels as if the poem was written like prose and
then Levine (or other poet using similar techniques)
goes back to breaks up the lines—maybe purposely
or maybe on a whim. It can be real with Line break
pauses or as full sentences. Readers can ignore
those line breaks until some kind of punctuation
like commas, semicolons—even dashes--tells
them to pause or a period or question mark tells
them to stop. When they read the poem that way,
the poem reads like what we are used to reading
all the time. You know. Sentences. That ultimately
makes it much easier to “understand.”
Maybe more depth, but still.
Here is an example from the poem “Visible
Thing” in Sedlaceks’ book.
The old jeans
factory
eaten alive
by kudzu for
some
time hummed
drummed along
spitting
out pants
of different hues.
the
kids playing
by the creek
could
always tell
The color of
the
dye that
day by looking
at
the water.
See?
They are sentences. They are capitalized at the
beginning, a period at the end. And we start seeing
a snapshot from the South (we know it’s the
South because of kudzu, but if we don’t know
kudzu is practically a man-eating plant from the
South, that’s ok). I mean we get that concept
from “eaten alive.” The reader can look
up “kudzu” on Google. Or not. We still
“get it.”
There some other neat stuff, too. Triplets. Middle
lines but one word. Maybe that’s a way to
make sure you know they aren’t important,
image-making words. Sometimes a poet lets a word
stand alone on its line for the opposite reason—to
give them more importance. Look at the sentences
and find the noun-subject—you know the ones
you learned about in the secondary school. “The
old jeans factory” leads the sentence as a
subject where we most usually find it.
I’m going to let you pick apart out the first
sentence in the poem, and then the second. Lo! It
turns out to be an environmental poem where the
fearsome kudzu wasn’t as damaging as the jeans
factory itself which has spit out colored poisons
into the very place where children play for years!
And Sedlacek has done all that without tsk, tsking
at you. No lecture. She supplies the visual in only
two sentences and you get to make up your own mind
about the deeper meaning based on images—just
a few details—she has presented to us. It
is so un-preachy that even climate deniers might
like it.
By the way, those line breaks, are good for a second
reading. You might find the last word in each line
so poignant, so laden with meaning that they become
a poem within a poem that describes the poem you
just read. You also might find some more meaning
in in it if you follow that last word in the line
to the next line to see if it leads to something
unexpected. Maybe you were expecting a cliché—and
then it doesn’t happen. It’s a little
surprise. A little fun within the poem. Yep, verbs,
too. What does the factory do? It “hummed
drummed along spitting out pants.” It’s
up to you to remember that subject—that it
is a jeans factory! But you don’t need to
worry about that because you’re used to figuring
out what any sentence is really about, even very
long sentences.
I highly recommend this book of poetry for readers
of poetry—those who love it and those who
“don’t understand it.” Much of
its beauty is in the simplicity. In fact, I highly
recommend, this poem to Dr. Bob Rich who assembles
literature that has an environmental inclination.
Now, I’ll tell you. I am a poet. As ostentatious
as that may sound, I urge you to get over it. I
am also a marketer. And a journalist. And a wife.
And a mom. And a grandmother. I even practice yoga.
Still. At my age! I am a regular bubbling pot full
of poetic ideas emanating from each of those parts
of me. And I want you to have as much fun—in
the reading of poems or in the writing of it—as
I do.
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