Poetry without Fear: National Poetry Month

We are living in a great age for poetry.

~ Anne Eliot

A

pril is National Poetry Month.  I’ve already begun to celebrate it by composing a new song.  It doesn’t match the spring colours, or warm spring days at all.  Forbidden love, angst, and large doses of frustration.  And of course, minor chords.

Oh. Yeah.

You already know some of my favorite poets.  Another one I enjoy reading is T.C. Samford.  His poems appear in different literary publications, including a chapbook of original poetry, Crossing the Border, written with poetry buddy Peter McEwen, and which he very kindly sent me.  Tom is one of my more fascinating and prolific pen friends.

Many people, both writer and reader alike, shy away from poetry.  Too difficult to pen, too complex to read and understand.  There are some self-important poets [and painters, sculptors, etc] who seem to create in order to confound and confuse.   But it doesn’t need to be that way. 

Art should not be feared. 

The point is to play ~ in writing poetry, with words, rhythm, structure, rhyme, imagery. This month, I encourage you to try some poetry play.  Share your playtime creations with us in the comments.

Oremus pro invicem,

~ Mikaela

By the way, the first person who can identify where today’s quote comes from will receive a free copy of Josephine Ross’s Jane Austen’s Guide to Good Manners.  Happy Easter and Blessed Passover!!

Word Count Blogathon Day 21: Falling in Love with the Poetry of Dana Gioia, Part III

I am the past that feeds upon the present.

I am the darkness that daylight denies.

I am the sins that you must inherit--

The final truth in a world full of lies.

~ Dana Gioia

Gioia lamented that while we are living in a great age to be a poet in terms of making a living at it, the only people who appear to read poetry are other poets.  It has become mostly an academic pursuit, instead of the art once employed and enjoyed by the average reader.  

American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group….Daily newspapers no longer review poetry….te large audience that still exists for quality fiction hardly notices poetry. A reader familiar with the novels of Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, or John Barth may not even recognize the names of Gwendolyn Brooks, Gary Snyder, and W. D. Snodgrass. 1

Sadly, this seems to be the direction all art is taking ~ save, perhaps, music.  My dear, if you can’t understand it, you are hopelessly uncultured and uneducated!  But art is not meant to be picked apart like day old road kill.  As Gioa put it Tuesday evening, “the purpose of poetry, indeed of all literature, is to instruct, delight, console and commemorate.”  Academia is focused solely on the first purpose and has completely forgotten the other three.

Of course, that is not anything new: look at Christ: he spoke in parables to the crowds, never theology or philosophy.  And see how the academic critics of his day liked it!

To look at the issue in strictly economic terms, most contemporary poets have been alienated from their original cultural function. As Marx maintained and few economists have disputed, changes in a class's economic function eventually transform its values and behavior. In poetry's case, the socioeconomic changes have led to a divided literary culture: the superabundance of poetry within a small class and the impoverishment outside it. One might even say that outside the classroom—where society demands that the two groups interact—poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms. 2

How sad is that last statement.  I feel like there was a divorce and I never even knew he was gone!

Reclaiming Our First Love

So what can be done about it?  As I mentioned on Thursday, we should learn to see poetry with new eyes by hearing it recited properly.  And by that I mean with passion and feeling and with an understanding of the rhythm and flow of words.

Sullivan has mentioned that he wants to begin hosting poetry nights.  Each guest will be given a short poem to memorize, which they will then recite at the party.  I think it is a brilliant idea and cannot wait for the first installment.

If you’re still new to poetry and the thought of a party is too much, start by taking a day [or morning or afternoon], grab a book of Dana Gioia’s poetry and head to your favorite spot.  It could be down by the river, in a canoe on the lake, under a tall magnolia, at the local coffee shop, or simply at home on the porch.  Sip your tea [preferably Southern sweet tea, of course!] and let the imagery capture you and the words roll around your mind and off your tongue.

You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to fall in love . . .with poetry.

Oremus pro invicem,

~ Mikaela

1,2: taken from D. Gioia's Can Poetry Matter?

Word Count Blogathon Day 20: Falling in Love with the Poetry of Dana Gioia, Part II

Poetry speaks of things that are true, with words that are beautiful.

~ Dante Alighieri

Where does poetry come from?  And how exactly does one become a poet?  It often begins at our mother’s knee.  Dana Gioa’s mother recited Poe’s “Annabelle Lee” to him; mine read me Clyde Robert Bulla’s “The Moon Singer.”  Gioia mentioned that his mother came from a dirt poor background; the poetry she was taught to memorize in school was as he put it, a way for her to “access beauty.” For my own mother, reading was a magical wardrobe into a Narnia of learning and better opportunities.

Teach a child to read and you open up vast new worlds to him; breathing on the creative spark already burning within his tiny breast and setting his imagination ablaze.  Teach a child poetry and you open up, not just a new world, but “a different way of speaking and writing.”  That was Dana Gioia’s response when asked for the definition of poetry.  And a child who is introduced to poetry from a young age will remember and cherish those childhood poems well into adulthood.  I can still recite, with only some faltering, “If”,  “In Flanders Fields,” as well as the iconic “Trees.”

In Gioia’s case, his mother’s love of poetry races like quicksilver in his blood and has created a great American poet.  What is your love and what, or rather who, will it create?  Now is the time to fashion the next generation of poets and writers.  What steps will you take to incorporate poetry into your life and the lives of your children?

Oremus pro invicem,

~ Mikaela

Word Count Blogathon Day 19: Falling in Love with the Poetry of Dana Gioia, Part I

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,

They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.

I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I

Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,

A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,

Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;

For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

 ~ William Johnson Cory

They told me, reader, that Dana Gioia would be speaking Tuesday night.  So to the University Club, my feet did fly.  And . . . I’m going to stop right there because I will just embarrass myself.  However, I did indeed meet Dana Gioia this past Tuesday at an evening conversation sponsored by The Trinity Forum on Poetry and Beauty in a Fallen World.

Recitation is the Key to Falling in Love . . . with Poetry

I was already a fan of his poetry ~ which seduces you with caressing lines and vivid imagery and his prose essays read almost like poetry, such is his lyrical mastery.  But it was his recitation of the poems ~ Cory’s “Heraclitus” quoted above, and his own “The Litany” ~ that bewitched my imagination and ignited intense emotions.

And Gioia said that it is this visceral reaction to the spoken word that gives poetry its warmth, its breath, its intoxicating scent.  Poetry is akin to music ~ the melodies come from the rhythm and cadence of the words and dramatic interpretation of the human speaker.  The majority of people, he said, do not enjoy poetry because they have never heard it recited properly.

For instance ~ and I apologize that I can only clumsily attempt to replicate his delivery, this being print after all ~ when speaking the last line of “Heraclitus,”  Gioia paused after “Death”, and emphasized “them”, with a slight breath before finishing the line and bowing his head slightly, as if in mourning.  In this sense, poetry recitation’s other sister is the art of acting, since the speaker will often infuse the words with the personality of the character speaking them.  In the case of “Heraclitus” the character speaking is Telemachus and Gioia became Telemachus, weeping at the news of the death of his friend.

It was then, with tears stinging my own eyes as I felt Telemachus' loss as if it were my own, that I truly fell in love with poetry.  And maybe . . . just a little . . . with Dana Gioia.

More on Dana and poetry tomorrow!

Oremus pro invicem,

~ Mikaela