Thoughts on Poetry

RHYS BOWEN: The death of Mary Oliver a few weeks ago started me thinking about poets and poetry. Poetry is something that is no longer part of our lives. If you asked a member of the younger generation to recite a poem, or even to name a living poet, they would not be able to do so.
And yet the other day something nearly fell off my balcony. I reached to grab it and turned to John saying, "Quick as it fell from it's broken staff, Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf."
"What?" he said, looking at me as if I'd gone gaga.
"Barbara Frietchie," I said. "Whittier."
He still looked puzzled.
"Don't you remember, "Up from the meadows rich with corn, Clear in the cool September morn..."
He had no idea what I was talking about and I realized that I could pretty much still recite all of that poem I learned in grade school.

Learning poetry by heart was a requirement in many of my English classes. I can still do Haiawatha, The Lady of Shallot, The Forsaken Merman, and many more.
There is a certain joy and satisfaction that comes from reciting poetry, borne along by the rhythm... Half a league, half a league, half a league onward. Into the field of death rode the six hundred."

So I wonder why we no longer enjoy and treasure poetry. Is it because our modern poems don't rhyme, aren't fun to recite? Or maybe many would-be poets are now song writers. Certainly many of the Beatles songs could be considered fine poetry.  And one has to admit that nobody gets rich from writing poetry!

Or is it just that we no longer have a need for it?  At the time of Tennyson poets were rock stars, revered, given knighthoods. I surmise that this was because there was no evening entertainment unless people entertained each other: learning and reciting poetry was a required asset for any young person. At a gathering they would be called upon to present their party piece. My great aunt Sarah (called Min by the family--yes we all have silly nicknames) could recite endless amounts of poetry, a lot of it dramatic and sad about poor children dying in their parents' arms and going to heaven. 

Poetry like that also took the place of history lessons. The Charge of the Light Brigade tells of the hopeless battle in Crimea. Ordinary people would not have known about it otherwise. It extols great deeds: How Horatio Held the Bridge. Of course, Shakespeare's works are all written in verse!

In the 1900s Rousseau and others theorized that humans could sing before speech evolved. Poetry was our natural means of communication. And now we have lost it. It seems we have reached a peak of language skills only to lose them again. CU later. Heart. Happy face.

One of the memorable moments of my life was walking around Robert Frost's farm with my friends, taking turns to read aloud the poems attached to different parts of the farm: the Woodpile, the swing, The Woods.... I still get chills thinking about it now. (Pic Tamra Bolton)

So Mary Oliver's death was particularly poignant to me as she is one of the few modern poets who actually spoke to me. The other was Leonard Cohen:
There is a Crack in Everything
That's How the Light Gets In.

Brilliant!
And Mary Oliver somehow touches a nerve

So dear Reds: Do you feel the loss of poetry? Did you have to learn poems when you were young? Can you still recite them?

HALLIE EPHRON: I had to memorize a ton of poems in school. Yes, Barbara Frietchie. Evangeline. My mother was a writer and had been an English major. She'd recite poetry at the dinner table, and as a result I know an odd assortment of poems from beginning to end ("Richard Corey," "The Congo," "Crossing the Bar." We had a massive two-volume set of poetry (British poets in one volume, America in the other) at home that I worked my way through, reading aloud to myself. I loved Edna Millay's poems ("My candle burns at both ends/It will not last the night.") And e. e. cummings ("Anyone lived in a pretty how town (with upso floating many bells down" )") Of course, Poe's tintinnabulating bells bells bells and raven quothing.

And I love to read poems to my grandkids, though they still need pictures to be truly interested. Shel Silverstein's are short and funny and well illustrated. Mother Goose. Dr. Seuss.

JENN McKINLAY: I didn't have to memorize poetry in school, but my mother was a librarian so we had to memorize it for her. I can still trot out Robert Frost's "The Road not Taken" or a dozen or so gems from Shel Silverstein, the poet of my childhood. My personal favorite is Dickinson's "Hope" is the thing with feathers, which I made the Hooligans memorize when they were young. But they've introduced me to some powerful poets in the guise of rap. There is one in particular, NF, that left me breathless with his word us in the song Mansion, which I would argue could be considered poetry. Example:
"Broken legs but I chase perfection
These walls are my blank expression
My mind is a home I'm trapped in
And it's lonely inside this mansion."
I think poetry will make a comeback, like all the art forms do, but maybe it already is in the young voices like NF, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, and Donald Glover who are using rap/poetry/spoken word in new and different ways to reach their generation.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Rhys, Mary Oliver's death has had me thinking a lot about poetry, too. I can't think of a modern poet who has reached so many people. I'm envious of your poetry rich upbringing, and of your memorization skills!

But while I don't remember my parents reading any poetry, I both read and wrote poetry from my teens at least into my thirties. I even slogged my way through Ezra Pound, which now astounds me. Then the novels seem to have overtaken my brain space, alas. Every year I vow to make more effort to read--and to reread--poetry--maybe this year I'll actually succeed! The first poem I memorized in my teens that still sticks is William Blake's Tyger, Tyger:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 
In the forests of the night; 
What immortal hand or eye, 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 

I can recite big chunks of Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales (my all time favorite, I think), some glorious Auden, and of course, Goodnight Moon.

(RHYS: Debs, I always think of the thing we used to say in school Tiger, Tiger burning bright--however did you catch alight?)

LUCY BURDETTE: I'm envious of all that childhood training too! We had a copy of THE CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES in the house and my father liked to recite "Under the spreading chestnut tree, a village smithy stands..." and so on. But that was about it. I know more poetry would help my writing and my mind, but I have trouble fitting it all in! Except that when it rains, John recites Paul Verlaine to me:  Il pleure dans mon coeur, Comme il pleut sur la ville; Quelle est cette langueur. Qui pénètre mon coeur?

And that means roughly, it rains in my heart like it rains over the village. What is this melancholy that penetrates my heart?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, sure, we had to do it--got to do it, I suppose. I  loved. it Frost ,and Shakespeare, and Yeats, and Auden. I remember a big wonderful discussion we had about Auden's heartbreaking September 1,1939. The first version of the poem ends: We must love one another, or die. But later, Auden rejected that, and refused to have that stanza published..finally, he relented, but only if it were changed to: We must love one another, and die. How different those are! And I thank my dear English teacher, Mr. Thornburg, for a discussion I will never forget.

When my father died a few years ago, I was asked to read a poem at his funeral. (Yikes, huh? Very high degree of difficulty.) I chose one I knew he loved, and I love too. Milosz's On Angels. I bet I could recite the whole thing, now, but it ends with a musing on the voice of what the author believes might as well be angels:

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draws near
another one
do what you can.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I love poetry. I can't recall if I was required to memorize when I was in school, or if I just did, but I know many sing-sing types of poems (Young Lochinvar, The Walrus and the Carpenter, Te Song of Wandering Aengus) by heart, and I can quote snatches of other poems all day long, including, "'Shoot i you must, this old gray head/But spare your country's flag!' she said." Rhys, I'm impressed you were taught Barbara Fritchie, as it's such an American moment!

My girls aren't much for poetry, but the Sailor loves it, and started writing poetry in middle school. When he was 14 or so, he began attending poetry slams in Portland, reading his verse aloud. It thrills me that it continues to be a part of his creative life.

I can't claim to have a favorite poem because it changes with the day and my mood, but Yeats has been meaningful to me lately:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep...

RHYS: So, dear friends. Thoughts on poetry. Do you still read it ? Does it mean a lot to you? Do you ever recite it out loud?