by Pamela Spiro Wagner
First, forget everything you have learned,
that poetry is difficult,
that it cannot be appreciated by the likes of you,
with your high school equivalency diploma,
your steel-tipped boots,
or your white-collar misunderstandings.
Do not assume meanings hidden from you:
the best poems mean what they say and say it.
To read poetry requires only courage
enough to leap from the edge
and trust.
Treat a poem like dirt,
humus rich and heavy from the garden.
Later it will become the fat tomatoes
and golden squash piled high upon your kitchen table.
Poetry demands surrender,
language saying what is true,
doing holy things to the ordinary.
Read just one poem a day.
Someday a book of poems may open in your hands
like a daffodil offering its cup
to the sun.
When you can name five poets
without including Bob Dylan,
when you exceed your quota
and don't even notice,
close this manual.
A few years ago, when we lived in California,I joined a writing group at our local theater house. I had pages and pages of stuff written down but I felt like I was drowning underneath all the words. I was hoping that they could give me some direction and some much needed editing. On a whim, I’d stuck an arbitrary paragraph that I‘d written into my stack of junk to take with me to the meeting. When it was my turn to read, I introduced myself, gave a run-down on what I’d been writing and then read the arbitrary paragraph out loud.
“What is this?" I asked. “It’s done, I don’t want to work on it any more, I've said what I wanted to say. I really like it…but WHAT is it?“There was a moment of silence in the room and then a lady in a purple bohemian skirt smiled at me from behind her rhinestone glasses and answered,
“It’s a poem. Honey, you're a poet."I stared at her in disbelief, she might as well have just told me that I had a big blue daisy growing right out of my head with roots hanging, tangled and dirty, around my ears. But, after a few seconds, her words sunk in and I thought, Of course! and that initial conversation began a poetry friendship that spanned HOURS and HOURS of poetry. I’d email her a poem, she’d comment and tweak and encourage and then I’d email her another one. She became my “poetry-mother” and helped birth me as “poet.” I now have written, literally, dozens and dozens of poems.
What I find so amazing is the fact that I missed this about myself. I earned an English degree and learned to love other poets - Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, e.e. cummings, Shakespeare, among others.
Well, actually, I know exactly what I did.
I made an assumption about poets
- that they are some sort of mystical fairytale creatures,
like an unicorn or a griffin, that exist “out there.”
Poets don’t run late, lose their keys, stumble up the stairs,
curse the squeak of stroller tires and wipe baby butts,
do they?
Well, actually yes, they do.
They are normal everyday people who live in suburbia
-contrary to my romantic notions, very few of them actually live on mountain tops.
(They do manage to eek the mystical out of the squeaking hinges of doors, late at night,
while attending to children who won’t go to bed,
they do suck the magic out of the sound of the wind as it tumbles
over their rooftops on rainy afternoons and
they do gnaw on the meat of boredom but, mostly,)
They’re people like me and you
who just happen to love playing with words.
Part of the problem was also that I didn’t like most poetry - actually, I was afraid of it. It seemed to be this high-brow thing that I didn’t understand and that I was afraid of “getting wrong.” I didn’t know that it could be accessible to people like me. Poetry that I was familiar with was too hard to read, harder to understand and I didn’t have time or energy to work that hard.
The truth about poetry, I’m finding out, is that it punches you in the gut. You don’t have to work at it. It speaks to you so deeply that there is no question what it means - to you, anyway. There are “tastes” to poetry. You don’t like ALL forms of music - country, hip-hop, rock, classical, bluegrass, etc -why would you like all forms of poetry? But you DO like some forms of music, right? In fact, I’d be willing to bet that you like some forms very, very much. Did we forget that all song is just poetry set to music? And, the fact that it means something to you, that it speaks to you on some level - that is what makes it “good.”
Poetry is just the art of finding the divine in the mundane.
(A poet looks at a dirty shoe and sees more.)
It makes us more than human.
It gives a reason and a mystery to the everyday.
After I discovered that old, normal, boring me could be considered a “poet,” I began to find the courage to seek out other poets. I found poetry everywhere, it just needed to be acknowledged - songs that I heard, dialog in movies, phrases spoken between friends, whole books that I’d read - everywhere. A good quote is, to me, a great form of poetry. One of my favorites is,
"The pessimist complains about the wind;
The optimist expects it to change;
The realist adjusts the sails.”
- William Arthur Ward
Aaaah, this is painting with words.
It is a snapshot of an idea, of feelings.
And, that funky line lay-out
is just the way
that the author
establishes a rhythm
and a cadence.
It's a way of emphasizing
certain ideas
and
certain phrases.
:)
(Writing a poem in Word with that ridiculous "auto-correct" switched on, just about drives me BATTY!!! No, I DO NOT want to capitalize that letter! No, really! I'm serious! LOWER CASE, please!!! GRRRR!!)
Eventually, I've even gotten up the guts to attempt to read poetry books. I don’t like all of it but what I do like, I find healing and growth in. I find something that speaks to me on a profound level.
For instance, a poem that has really spoken to me and helped me to heal is Mary Oliver’s “The Journey.”
The Journey
by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life you could save.
So, I shall share with you one of my poems. I am still nervous about sharing most of my poetry. I don’t feel like I have anything left to prove but no one LIKES to hear criticism. I mean, really, any mom may KNOW that her kid is ugly, but that doesn't mean that she wants you to point out the fallacies of lil' Junior Frankenstein's face. So, I’ll share one that won first place in our local poetry contest when I lived in California, it was published in a local anthology and people just seem to “get it.” So, here it is:
Ex-
by A(-Girl)
2nd wife.
Not the first.
Used up.
Youth budded.
Un-soul mate.
Marriage of convenience?
“No,”
he says without even
taking his eyes off
the highway, like
he doesn’t know
that this subject
is a bag of rocks
hung around my heart
keeping me from
breathing easily in
our relationship.
“This marriage is a decision
that I made after I was older,
after I’d discovered who I was.
After I’d figured out
what I really wanted
in my life
and what I really wanted
was you.”
And I look at him
in the darkness
of the wet night
as he turns on the
windshield wipers
and glances behind himself
in the rear view mirror.
And I realize that
he doesn’t even
know that he has
heaved every one
of my boulders
into the sea.
It’s like that with us.
In my forties and beyond, I want to spend more time with my poetry (and other people’s poetry.) I want to continue painting companion pieces for my poetry (the picture below goes with my poem, “A Deserter in the Foxhole.”)
 |
(…Now, unspoken words lie buried between us like land mines and so, slowly and deliberately, I desert this foxhole, abandoning my pain and leaving you there in your frozen denial -trapped within the gritty walls of man-made dirt. And you? You carry the foxhole inside of you. You smell of musty places, always…) |
I want to get beyond my fear that if it doesn't make me any money (or fame) then it can’t be worth doing. I want to learn that it is enough, I am enough. Whatever joy and fulfillment that the day brings is, at sundown, enough. I want to learn to be content with exactly where I am in my life and exactly who I am. I want my life to be a poem - full of passion and hope and substance where it really counts.
Oh, and :
1) Langston Hughes
2) Mary Oliver
3) Pamela Spiro Wagner
4) William Shakespeare
And,
5) Me, A-Girl
Hahahaha There ya go! I am no longer a “beginner.” :)
“To me a good poem
is like a sacred mind-altering substance;
you take it into your system and it carries you beyond your ordinary ways of understanding.”
- Kim Rosen, The Sun, pg 5, December 2010
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