National Poetry Month

It's National Poetry Month! Yay! My grand scheme last year for posting favorite poems fell through quickly and mightily. I am not so foolish to make more silly promises this time around.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~Leonard Cohen

      National Poetry month is one of those celebrations acknowledged only by poets, poet nerds, and a handful of eager high school English teachers. Many people dislike poetry after forcefully learning "Ode on Grecian Urn" and some flowery Blake they never understand, or cast it in the drawer of things 'too high-brow for me.' (Full confession: I love Blake AND 'Grecian Urn'. Yes, I'm a poetry nerd) I want to read to these people the simple beauty of Whitman, the joy of Silverstein, the stark bluntness of Akhmatova. But you can't win them all. As long as there are creative people writing poetry, and grateful people reading it, we will end up alright.
      For me, poetry is an escape to a world where rhythm and meter rule thoughts. Even dark words of war and sorrow open beacons of light on a drab reality. I like my declarations of love and wonder and sadness to exist somewhere between word and song. Paint my life in flowing rhythm of verse!
      I am, of course, markedly jealous of those writers capable great poetry, Covetous of their mastery of language. My pathetic attempts are plentiful, and heroically mediocre at the bet of times. Even as the editor of the high school lit magazine I could never get beyond bland. It has, admittedly, been a long time since I wrote any verse. I don't know if my cluttered mind can sit still long enough anymore. It takes time, and patience.

      The poster for National Poetry Month 2011 is in striking contrast to last year's graphic explosion. Instead the colors are more muted and font simple. The main content is from A work by Elizabeth Bishop, which makes me both happy and proud. Bishop is a Vassar graduate (Class of 1934) and one of our more famous Alumna. And though Vassar is not my alma mater, I sill feel a sense of pride and ownership here. I grew up in the shadows of its brick buildings, often playing and learning on the campus. I had never heard of, nor read, anything by Bishop before coming to work at Vassar. This is not very odd since I knew very little of American poetry at all. Here we have an art installation of benched inscribed with snippets of her work that line a winding path. Since learning of her I have read some of her poetry, though none of her prose. I enjoy her work. Her style is clean and flowing, but direct. I love that she described the places she traveled to, taking us there with her not just visually but emotionally. Though to the point, I feel like there is still a between the lines to read. It feels classic and contemporary all at once. I still no very little about her life, but at the moment I am satisfied with a sitting down occasionally with an anthology and learning about her through her writing.
      This year marks the 100th anniversary of her life, and she was our Poet Laureate at one point,so the quote on the poster is not random. It just so happens that it coincides with Vassar's sesquicentennial celebrations. I am sure that the administration is very proud. I would like to take the opportunity to share some Bishop here.

The Map
Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to life the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?

Teh shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of seashore towns run out to the sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
--the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between the thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.

Mapped water are more quiet that the land is,
lending the land their waves' own confirmation:
and Norway's hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
--What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.

~ from North and South, 1946

LINKS:
Elizabeth Bishop @ poets.org
Elizabeth Bishop wiki
National Poetry Month

Song of Whitman - an introduction to American verse

I have indeed started Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The inspiration budded from an exhibit and lecture on him and John Burroughs. Knowing nothing about the lives or writings of either, I found it all v. interesting. Other little moments cumulated to my last post and my need to read this early Whitman classic.

Being such a slow reader I am still in the early portions of "Song of Myself" but I can't help but love it. It's been a while since I really sunk my teeth in to a long verse work and I'm enjoying the extra brain power it takes to process it all. He has this style unlike anything I've read. I guess I just read too many classics (he was so highly criticized when he was first publishing for not writing like everyone else).
The short pieces in the Inscriptions section say so much in so little. I am using a borrowed copy, but I feel that I must dig out my copy (I am told we own it, and I assume that we would) just to line it with book darts on sections that really hit me. I keep forgetting my little tin of them and can't bear to put any post-its in this 1912 copy I am using! Certain passages make me smile in spite of myself. Others seem like he was in my head when he wrote them (only my words are never as beautiful or graceful as his). In 2008 I find such meaning in these old words. That, to me, is the true power of a great writer - timelessness. I know that in his own time critics thought him crude, perverse, and near pornographic. I see passages that may have seemed that way then, but today of course seem tame. Sometimes it takes a sharp and shocking image to make an idea clear - often a tame idea, at that!


WHEN I READ THE BOOK
When I red the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life
(As if any man really knew aught of my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little of nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

This came from the man before John Burroughs read Leaves of Grass, before he wrote copious pages on the life of Whitman and defensing his work. How ironic! Barely read in his own time, Whitman today is considered such an American treasure, so beloved! How terrible, too, that at age 24 I am only reading him for the first time (save for "O Captain! My Captain!" which I should have learned in school BUt I think I read it on my own. It was in a book called What you 5th grader ought to know something that I feel should be given to public school boards. I mean, who hasn't at least heard of it?? It, too, is in this book! I never knew!)

Why isn't he more widely taught? We teach English poetry so much in schools, why not the poets of this country? While you're banging through "The Road Less Taken" add some Whitman in the mix for comparison. He lived and wrote during such a fascinating and dynamic period in our history, making his own path through the wilderness of writing. I didn't take American literature in college (Renaissance, Japanese, and Russian) but I feel like he should be covered in high school. I think that his straightforward style would be v. teachable to that age, and appealing. I don't think that "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is really the style that will inspire students in this day and age to write poetry. It is beautiful, of course. I loved it at once. But I know that any poem beginning with 'Thou' automatically makes half the students roll their eyes or fall asleep. Whitman feels, at times, like he could have written it last month, not a hundred years ago.


Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.
...


I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.


I will continue this journey through American poetry. It feels almost like a journey through myself.

Leaves of Whitman are falling, it seems

Something is afoot.
Synchronicity, I think people call it.
Someone or something in the universe wants me to read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
I must do this now.