My mother always told me if I was expecting a guest and my house was in chaos to open the windows and put out fresh flowers.
Well, Patricia came up to stay overnight, and since most of my basement was stored higgle piggle in my living room, I did just that. And, when my new poetry magazine arrived, the colors and image went so well with the flowers that I left it out as part of the arrangement.
Which slides into what I have been thinking about ever since I read a comment some guy put after a poem (not her poem...some other writer) a friend of mine put on her blog. Here's the quote.
"Too bad that the people who write these kinds of poems are the ones
furthest away from living the message withing (sic) them. Then again, maybe
that's part of their appeal?"
The arrogance (and ignorance) of this statement really annoyed me. Obviously, the guy made a judgement about something he knows nothing about. He doesn't know anything about the lives of the poets....Byron swimming the Hellespont, John Donne and his mistresses, Shakespeare in the tumult of an Elizabethan London or poor despairing Sylvia Plath with her head in the oven.
Perhaps giving him just the tiniest benefit of the doubt, he had been forced to endure some of those academic readings where poets read their work with high fluting voices and rising inflections on every phrase. I must admit those readings are crazy making.
However, this guy has no idea about the lives of these poets, bad readings or not.
Good poets don't live in ivory towers. First of all, they must be good observers and most of all, they must have a passionate need to process what they observe and experience in their lives. It certainly isn't for the money.
Poems can be about something as mundane as the worn finish on kitchen cabinets or a chicken next to a red wheelbarrow, or it can be about Lucifer coming through the realms of hell to visit earth. Milton was blind and filled with religious fervour....it was his life to "see" these things. William Carlos Williams was a doctor who felt very deeply the plight and suffering of an old lady patient as she lay dying on her bed. He experinced the joy of eating a plum from the fridge just as much as the bleakness of the landscape in his Paterson, New Jersey.
Poetry can be as raw and urgent as Picasso's Guernica or the primary colors of a spring bouquet or the harsh March wind. It can be subtle as one of Basho's meditations on a frog jumping into water, or a poem by Rumi about the love of God.
My point is that these poet's lives and their art are of one piece.
Discounting the gassy exhalations of people who rhyme stanzas with abstractions of "love!" "patriotism!" "mother", etc etc. (they are not poets), a true poet writes about what he feels deeply and cares enough to craft into art. As with many of the arts in this pragmatic country, poetry guarantees little in the realm of financial security and fame, but I believe reading and making poetry can help make whole what seems random and meaningless in the lives of individuals in our society.
When I worked with a poetry group, I came to this realization when the group kept asking me the fatal question...."just what and why is your choice of word, this phrase, your stance on an event?" Where did this observation come from. How well do you understand it?"
I find myself caught up by these questions ever since. It changed my life.
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