I begin National Poetry Month by saying that my laptop has terrible recording quality, due to the fact that the microphone picks up the sound of the internal fan. But! An external microphone is en route to my apartment as I type this, so hopefully by day three or four the recording quality will be better.
I'm beginning with a poem by Robert Bly, mostly because in my practice runs over the past few days this one turned out the best. By rights I should probably start with something by Wendell Berry, who is the first poet I took seriously as an artist, I think; I cut a poem of his out of a handout in eighth grade and taped it above my bed, for example, and nine years later I am more familiar with his body of work as a whole than I am with any other poet, but. "Conversations With the Soul" isn't such a terrible choice - it gets at how I feel about poems, anyway.
It reminds me of Ray Bradbury talking about writing: "I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories ... Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
Talking about poetry from middle school has sent me down a whole rabbit trail of memories - I wrote a letter to Wendell Berry a few weeks ago (to which I received a response!!) in which I said that his poem "Woods" was the first poem I consciously memorized, but that actually isn't true. The first poem I remember memorizing is "Just Me" by Margaret Hillert - a children's poem I memorized in third grade, which I remembered well enough to just find online. And I also clearly remember the poem I Have to Write by April Halprin Wayland, which was from my 7th grade English class.
...My poetry prof & mentor from EMU asked me what I will memorize this April; the problem is that nearly all the poems I love I have at least partially in my head, and so picking them doesn't feel like a challenge, but I don't want to just randomly pick something I don't love.
Ummmm. It would probably be the depressing sort of irony to memorize a poem called "The Failure of Language" during National Poetry Month, right? Maybe the blackberry poem by Seamus Heaney, instead. Or "Touch Me" by Stanley Kunitz.
This weekend some out-of-town friends visited me & the Housemate and the five of us went downtown on Saturday to catch the afternoon readings from the Split this Rock poetry festival. "Poems of Provocation and Witness" was the tagline, and the readings were held in the National Geographic Grosvenor Auditorium - which is currently displaying images and quotes from the tv series Cosmos, and it was like all my favorite things in the world smushed together at once. I felt shivery with excitement while we were waiting, and was not disappointed.
Eating dinner at the apartment afterwards, my friends were asking me things about poetry and my thoughts about Split This Rock, and I talked for a bit about spoken word poetry (which is what was happening that Saturday). It can be lazy sometimes, I told them. Because you can draw people in by how passionate your voice sounds, by how loud you can yell, and the language will suffer. I care too much about the language to enjoy it very much when the poet gets lazy, even if their message is good. This is why I find myself occasionally annoyed by Sarah Kay. (I talked about this with Ken J at EMU once, about social justice hymns and the ways they can lack the beauty of a less pointed lyric.)
Anyway.
These poets weren't lazy; they were brilliant. There was one poet there (Myra Sklarew) who was both biologist and poet, which was awesome. But my favorite was Gayle Danley, who kept her audience on pins and needles, working us like a magician - laughing one moment, silent the next. In her poem "Just like you," which I linked to, she finishes by saying that she "hopes that boy will finish his sentence," meaning both a line of words and a prison term, and the double meaning reverberated in my head for a long time.
Robert Bly can be lazy sometimes, too, I think, undercutting his ideas with words that are very hard to picture. Words like "soul," for that matter. But "Conversations With the Soul" has enough solidity to it that I forgive him for that.
I'm beginning with a poem by Robert Bly, mostly because in my practice runs over the past few days this one turned out the best. By rights I should probably start with something by Wendell Berry, who is the first poet I took seriously as an artist, I think; I cut a poem of his out of a handout in eighth grade and taped it above my bed, for example, and nine years later I am more familiar with his body of work as a whole than I am with any other poet, but. "Conversations With the Soul" isn't such a terrible choice - it gets at how I feel about poems, anyway.
"This field is getting too small," she said.
"Don't you know anyone else
To fall in love with?"
It reminds me of Ray Bradbury talking about writing: "I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories ... Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
Talking about poetry from middle school has sent me down a whole rabbit trail of memories - I wrote a letter to Wendell Berry a few weeks ago (to which I received a response!!) in which I said that his poem "Woods" was the first poem I consciously memorized, but that actually isn't true. The first poem I remember memorizing is "Just Me" by Margaret Hillert - a children's poem I memorized in third grade, which I remembered well enough to just find online. And I also clearly remember the poem I Have to Write by April Halprin Wayland, which was from my 7th grade English class.
...My poetry prof & mentor from EMU asked me what I will memorize this April; the problem is that nearly all the poems I love I have at least partially in my head, and so picking them doesn't feel like a challenge, but I don't want to just randomly pick something I don't love.
Ummmm. It would probably be the depressing sort of irony to memorize a poem called "The Failure of Language" during National Poetry Month, right? Maybe the blackberry poem by Seamus Heaney, instead. Or "Touch Me" by Stanley Kunitz.
This weekend some out-of-town friends visited me & the Housemate and the five of us went downtown on Saturday to catch the afternoon readings from the Split this Rock poetry festival. "Poems of Provocation and Witness" was the tagline, and the readings were held in the National Geographic Grosvenor Auditorium - which is currently displaying images and quotes from the tv series Cosmos, and it was like all my favorite things in the world smushed together at once. I felt shivery with excitement while we were waiting, and was not disappointed.
Eating dinner at the apartment afterwards, my friends were asking me things about poetry and my thoughts about Split This Rock, and I talked for a bit about spoken word poetry (which is what was happening that Saturday). It can be lazy sometimes, I told them. Because you can draw people in by how passionate your voice sounds, by how loud you can yell, and the language will suffer. I care too much about the language to enjoy it very much when the poet gets lazy, even if their message is good. This is why I find myself occasionally annoyed by Sarah Kay. (I talked about this with Ken J at EMU once, about social justice hymns and the ways they can lack the beauty of a less pointed lyric.)
Anyway.
These poets weren't lazy; they were brilliant. There was one poet there (Myra Sklarew) who was both biologist and poet, which was awesome. But my favorite was Gayle Danley, who kept her audience on pins and needles, working us like a magician - laughing one moment, silent the next. In her poem "Just like you," which I linked to, she finishes by saying that she "hopes that boy will finish his sentence," meaning both a line of words and a prison term, and the double meaning reverberated in my head for a long time.
Robert Bly can be lazy sometimes, too, I think, undercutting his ideas with words that are very hard to picture. Words like "soul," for that matter. But "Conversations With the Soul" has enough solidity to it that I forgive him for that.
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