Libby’s Embarrassing Poetry Problem

This week, Libby tries to read poetry for fun. How does it go? Read more to find out

So, I’ve been ordered to keep mum on The Hunger Games (Editor’s note: There’s a Mega-Review forthcoming, don’t worry), but I cannot lie and pretend it isn’t the only thing on my mind at the moment. In fact, it had enough of an impression on me that I’m feeling the need to see it again, if only to absorb it properly, as soon as possible. I’m not sure when I will be able to stop thinking about it every 30 seconds, but I do know that when a film does that, it is a good film.

And now I shall say no more about it.

Anyway — whilst I was hungering for the game last night, I was also thinking about Keats. Being an English major, I’ve taken several literature classes this year and enjoyed them very much. But I have also realized that I have what we might term an Embarrassing Poetry Problem.

Which is this: I have no idea how to read the bloody stuff.

The reason I’m an English major has something to do with reading James and the Giant Peach when I was six — my first novel — and watching my world expand. It has something to do with finding books like Harry Potter and Emma and Enna Burning and Hons and Rebels and The Book Thief during my teens that changed my views completely. It has something to do with my lifelong obsession with creative writing, and the beauty of a well-structured novel, and the spark that makes characters come to life. But it doesn’t have anything to do with poetry.

The trouble is that I’ve never read it for fun. I don’t know how to approach it. I’ve been reading novels all my life, but poetry is just something that has never interested me. I think part of it is that most of the time, poetry lacks a real story, and story is the entire reason I read. And when it does have a story — when it’s something like Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”, for example — it often has so many metaphors and allusions that it takes real, arduous work to make sense of it. It isn’t the sort of thing you can understand initially, unless you are a very close reader. And I’ve always prized clarity and simplicity in writing, so this goes against all instinct.

“Use your five senses,” people say. “See what you feel. Look for imagery. Watch the meter.”

And I’ve tried this. And I did get somewhere. Earlier this year I found that I liked Spenser for his Faerie Queene epic and some of his quirky poems about mythical beasts. And I liked Blake for his pure Englishness and amusing little rhymes. But these have been very much the exception, and I like these poets for exactly the same reasons I like novelists. Their stuff is quirky and clever, or else sweeping and dramatic, and that’s the kind of thing I’ve always read.

Keats, on the other hand, is a different story.

People I really, really respect like Keats. Stephen Fry, for example, is a sworn Keats fan. J.K. Rowling has referenced him. The couple of other English majors I’ve mentioned my trouble to have all gasped, “You don’t like Keats?” I want desperately to like Keats. In fact, I want to like him so badly that I’ve decided I will, eventually, in exactly the same way I forced myself to like coffee. I’m just not exactly sure how. You can’t drink old poetry in the mornings with just a little less milk and sugar than the day before.

Here are the first few lines of his “Ode to a Grecian Urn”:

THOU still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape	5
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

On first glance, my brain goes “THIS IS DULL.”

Then I remember that I want to enjoy it, so I look very closely at it and think, “well, ‘foster-child of Silence and slow Time’ is a nice phrase. Actually it’s a very nice phrase. But I’m not sure what it means. Hmm.”

And apparently there’s only so much not-understanding that my brain can take, because — generally — after a few minutes of this, I will put the Keats down and go bury my nose in Jane Austen instead.

I think what I’m looking for is some kind of link — a reason to care, I suppose, since there are rarely well-rounded characters to care about. The feelings expressed in old poems are all very well and good, but I like context for feelings; a clear-cut situation as to their origin. And beautiful sunsets, clouds and daffodils are nice, but I am an incredibly unobservant person and do not have much observational ability even in my head. I know there’s a link somewhere — there must be, as Keats and his fellows are so well-liked by the Stephen Frys of the world — but I can’t seem to find it just yet, and that makes me sad.

So I’ve decided this is going to be a step-by-step process. Rome wasn’t built in a day, after all, as I’m sure the Roman poets would attest. For now I shall appreciate nice phrases and work on not being bored by the rest. With a little luck, I’ll be a Keats fangirl before the year is out.

Pounding it

I haven’t really talked about any poetry yet so I’m going to do that now. Last month I went to Robert Mezey’s poetry reading at the College’s art museum. While I was talking to Mezey after the reading I mentioned that I’ve been studying Ezra Pound’s masterpiece, The Cantos, for fun. And the poet informed me that while he (Mezey) was studying at the University of Pennsylvania (Pound’s alma mater), he and a buddy actually visited Pound while he was staying in a mental hospital in the District of Columbia. When they were told Pound wasn’t allowed to meet strangers, they asked the guard to tell Pound they knew one of his old professors, and Pound apparently cried “Let them in, they’re friends!” And they visited him multiple times after that.

As a massive fan of Ezra Pound, I was pretty thrilled. EZRA POUND, one of the best free-verse poets ever. Check this out, it’s Canto IV, from The Cantos: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241046

I’m just overwhelmed by all the allusions here. And everything about the composition is just fantastic, its rhythm and diction and symmetry, and (when you read the other parts of The Cantos) the way it calls back to other parts of the poems.

The entire Cantos is much, much longer, by the way.

What happened to free-verse poetry? Most free-verse poems I see today are more or less just paragraphs with nice vocabulary and arbitrary line breaks. Pick up any student-grade literary magazine and most of the poetry in it is going to be like this– essentially just words thrown around on the page, words thrown into vague images to support emotional clichés. Good free-verse poetry is so much more than that. I think perhaps we should practice poetry with more constraints, like sonnets and villanelles or even just blank verse. Yeah, it’s hard to give it rhythm and it’s hard to make it rhyme. But maybe forcing yourself to force your theme, your message, your idea into constrained poetic forms is really a way of forcing yourself to think way harder than you ever thought you’d have to about what exactly you’re trying to say. Which words are necessary; which can you cut out; is it appropriate to pick a synonym that would rhyme better? In what order should you organize your poem’s points? Master the constrained forms. Pound did. T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg; these free-verse masters all wrote under constraints, too. And you can see it in their free poetry, in the rhythm and rhymes that still appear in them, just less predictably than in sonnets, etc. And they all edited these free-verse poems like crazy. Try it all out sometime. And maybe you’ll find free-verse isn’t so free after all.

As for Mezey, he’s a fantastic poet. Check out his poems sometime. Here’s a great sonnet on the nature of composing poetry: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/01/21/080121po_poem_mezey