A Cranky Reader: What I Crave When I Read Poetry

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Ars Poetica, contemporary poetry, Creative Nonfiction, critique, Emily Dickinson, modern poetry, poetry, reading poetry, T.S. Elliot, Wallace Stevens, what is poetry

I was invited to write a guest blog post about poetry on Luanne Castle’s Writer Site. The following was first published on her site in a slightly different version.

I’ve been thinking a lot about poetry lately, how some speaks to me and some not at all. While reading recent issues of prestigious literary journals, I was surprised to find that not one poem—not one—moved me. Amazing!

Most seemed like intellectual exercises or obtuse offerings of random thoughts and images. None engaged me intellectually, or stimulated my sensibilities, or even challenged me—let alone invited me—to a second reading. Instead they were studies in disappointment. I left them unfulfilled, still hungry and, admittedly, cranky.

Is it me? Is it them? (Sigh).

Just what is it I crave from poetry?

Wallace Stevens once famously said: “You can’t get the news from poems, but men die every day for lack of what is found there.”

That’s what I want: The thing we die from lack of. That’s why I read poetry. What I look for in other works of art too—in prose and painting and music that rise to the level of poetry.

I want what Emily Dickinson referred to when she says, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Something that tickles the hintermost parts of my brain, where I feel the synapses stretch and snap, reaching toward something just past my grasp.

I want what T.S. Elliot meant to when he writes that “poetry is a raid on the inarticulate.” Something dark and dormant, lying just below consciousness, rising into the light: a curved fin, a humped back, gliding momentarily along the surface of thought before dipping below again.

We have all felt that, I’m sure. Something deep and delicious, once known and now forgotten, woken momentarily. Something within us re-ignited, flashing briefly before dissolving into darkness again.

In “Ars Poetica,” Archibald MacLeish says: “A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit.”

He says: “A poem should be wordless / As the flight of birds.”

He says:

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

Reading his poem, I’m with him. I’m saying: Yes!

But then he almost ruins it with the last two lines:

A poem should not mean
But be.

Pointing to something static. Not in motion. Art for art’s sake. An artifact showcased in a museum.

Gwendolyn Brooks writes:

Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms.
Art hurts. Art urges voyages–
And it is easier to stay at home,
The nice beer ready.

If it doesn’t make us squirm, if it doesn’t hurt, if it doesn’t urge voyages, is it art? Is it poetry?

Stevens calls modern poetry “the poem of the mind.” It’s “the act of finding what will suffice.”

He says:

It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.

A poem must construct something that it inhabits, that speaks to the reader, in the “delicatest ear of the mind,” “exactly, that which it wants to hear,” what the reader, that invisible audience, wants to hear—which is not the play, not the poem, but “itself.” Itself “expressed / In an emotion as of two people, as of two emotions becoming one.”

It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

Stevens is saying that a poem can no more “be” than “mean.” Rather, it must act. It must unite poet and reader in the act of finding what will suffice.

It is not static: It is “a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman combing.” It is always moving. It moves us to capture it in its passing. It moves us beyond ourselves, where the top of our head lifts away and there we go unbounded, grasping for a brief moment what lies always, already, just beyond our grasp.

That which suffices. That which the lack thereof we die of every day. That’s what I’m looking for when I read poetry.

I want to feel my synapses snapping.

Emily Dickinson, Blogger Extraordinaire

Tags

Arts, Blogging, Emily Dickinson, Love letters to the world, Online Writing, poetry

I cannot help wondering whether Emily Dickinson, that famous recluse, would not have been an avid blogger if she had lived today.

If some of those love letters to the world she wrote, scribbled on scraps of paper scattered about the house, might not have found their way into blog posts.

Imagine these gems from the few letters she actually did write as whispers sent through cyberspace.

Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel.

You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell; and the noise in the pool at noon excels my piano.

I find ecstasy in living; the mere sense of living is joy enough.

A letter always feels like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend . . . there seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone.

It is true that the unknown is the largest need of the intellect, though for it no one thinks to thank God.

Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it.

You speak of “disillusion.” That is one of the few subjects on which I am an infidel. Life is so strong a vision, not one of it shall fail.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

You mention spring’s delaying—I blame her for the opposite. I would eat evanescence slowly.

The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for the first the river in the tree.

A circus passed the house—still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out.

I write you from the summer. The murmuring leaves fill up the chinks through which the winter red shone . . . . and frogs sincerer than our own splash in their Maker’s pool.

The career of flowers differs from ours only in inaudibleness. I feel more reverence as I grow for these mute creatures whose suspense or transport may surpass my own.

How vast is the chastisement of beauty, given us by our Maker! A word is inundation, when it comes from the sea.

Love is that one perfect labor naught can supersede.

Affection is like bread, unnoticed till we starve, and then we dream of it, and sing of it, and paint it, when every urchin in the street has more than he can eat.

Do not try to be saved, but let redemption find you, as it certainly will. Love is its own rescue; for we, at our supreme, are but its trembling emblems.

We turn not older with years, but newer every day.

Ah! Dainty—dainty Death! Ah! Democratic death! Grasping the proudest zinnia from my purple garden,–then deep to his boson calling the serf’s child! Say, is he everywhere? Where shall I hide my things?

Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.

I believe we shall in some manner be cherished by our Maker—that the One who gave us this remarkable earth has the power still farther to surprise that which He has caused. Beyond that all is silence . . . .

Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do, is what detains the sky.

To have been made alive is so chief a thing, all else inevitably adds. Were it not riddled by partings, it were too divine.

Home is the definition of God.

[On a friend’s death]   “Going home”—was he not an Aborigine of the sky?

[Written the day before her death]   Little Cousins, –Called back. Emily