Category Archives: Poetry

I wrote about poetry reading generally yesterday, so today I thought I’d write about how my current poetry read is going, Jane Kenyon’s Otherwise. I’m liking it, although I don’t think I’ve quite figured it out yet. I’ve read maybe 40 pages out of 200 or so, so I still have time. I’m not quite sure what I mean when I say I haven’t figured it out yet, except that I’m thinking as I read about what it is that makes the poems poetry, what unites them, if anything, what Kenyon’s style is, what makes her a great poet, if she is indeed a great poet.

Although I’ve sort of read poetry for a while, mostly in my capacity as a teacher, I’ve taken up more serious and steady poetry reading purely for pleasure once again after a long, long break without reading it much. So as I read, I’m figuring out what it is I like in a poem and what kind of poetry draws me. So far I’ve been very pleased with my choices; I’ve read Mary Oliver’s American Primitive and Jane Hirschfield’s Given Sugar, Given Salt and was blown away by them both. I think I loved them both so much because their poems were beautiful and they were wise. Kenyon’s are those things too, but I’m still figuring out how.

I’m realizing that poetry may do something substantially different for me than fiction does. I try to be widely read in fiction — I try to read from different cultures and different time periods and I try to read different novel types. With poetry, I’m less interested in that kind of coverage. I read poetry very slowly — these days I’m reading only a handful of poems a week so it will take me forever to get through a book — and so will never read all that widely. And with poetry, I’m more likely to go for what I think will be a comfort read. In fiction I might try an author I’m afraid I won’t like; in poetry I wouldn’t do that.

Jane Kenyon’s Otherwise is made up of “new and selected” poems; it makes me wish I had full, individual volumes of her work instead of selections from the different books, as I wonder how much each book has a central theme, and how much I might be missing reading poems outside the context of the original book. I’m reading selected poems from her book From Room to Room right now, and many of the poems seem to be about visiting or living with her husband’s family, about visits to elderly relatives, about funerals and mourning. And I wonder if there’s a story behind the book or a theme that runs through the book that I’m not getting. In that case, the poems would be discrete units in and of themselves, but they would also together form a whole as a book.

Here’s an example of a poem from the book:

Cleaning the Closet

This must be the suit you wore
to your father’s funeral:
the jacket
dusty, after nine years,
and hanger marks on the shoulders,
sloping like the lines
on a woman’s stomach, after
having a baby, or like the down-
turned corners
of your mouth, as you watch me
fumble to put the suit
back where it was.

So what makes that a poem? It’s got images in it — the hanger marks slope like lines on a woman’s stomach or like the corners of the man’s, probably her husband’s, mouth. It creates a mood and captures a moment – the husband seems unhappy, frowning at being reminded of his father’s funeral. The dust and hanger marks make the passing time vivid, and yet the emotion is still there. You’ve got the death and life theme, with the reference to having a baby, and cleaning out the closet makes one think of renewal.

The situation is rather complex, really, as the speaker is speaking directly to the man, who seems to frown at what is happening – not liking to be reminded of the funeral or unhappy that the speaker has taken the suit out, and the speaker fumbles to put the suit back, as though she has done something wrong, invaded some space she shouldn’t have. Watching the woman clean out the closet is too painful for the man, I suppose, so the speaker tries to make up for evoking hard memories by returning the suit to its original place, as though she could undo her original action. Maybe she doesn’t even know for sure that that’s the suit her husband wore to the funeral but can gauge it by her husband’s reaction. Cleaning out the closet brings too much into the daylight.

There’s probably more going on there, that I haven’t gotten to?

Okay – one thing I can say about what makes a poem a poem, is that a poem says more in a few words than I can say in a lot of them in prose!

David Orr has a very interesting article on poetry in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review; he’s reviewing a new book by Stephen Fry called The Ode Less Travelled, which, though it’s a terrible title, sounds like a great book, and I liked the review because Orr writes very sensibly about what it takes to understand poetry and why many people are a bit afraid of it. I’m guessing I’ll never read Fry’s book about poetry, but the review is good enough I’m tempted. Orr talks about how people come to poetry with unreasonable expectations; they expect “either to be awed by excellence or overwhelmed by the Raw Passion of It All” and instead are disappointed:

only rarely do lay readers experience poems as a cross between an orgasm and a heart attack; usually, the response is closer to “What?” or “Eh” or at best “Hm.” This doesn’t mean that other reactions aren’t possible; but such reactions generally come from learning what exactly is going on.

He goes on to say, “You learn what’s going on by reading carefully, questioning your own assumptions and sticking with things even when you’re confused or nervous.”

Orr is particularly good on what he calls The Fear — the anguished or icy reaction teachers get from students when asked to respond to poetry in class. General readers too often see poetry as unapproachable, difficult, impossible for the average person to get. And so they stay away from it or resent it.

I like Orr’s point that understanding poetry takes time and practice — I agree, at least once you get beyond the most immediately accessible stuff — and it takes an interest and curiosity and a certain self-confidence. Many students don’t have these things, and so give up before they’ve really tried and poetry remains off in its own world they’ll never willing venture into.

I’m not sure what a teacher should do about this, except maybe try to get students to build some confidence by rewarding their interpretive efforts even when they are a bit lacking. I’ve entertained some pretty unlikely interpretations in class simply because I don’t want to crush a student’s excitement at having begun to figure things out. I think, though, that students are alert to any hint of the idea that poetry can mean whatever you want it to, and they jump at the opportunity that idea offers to say whatever they want, but at the same time they despise the wishy-washiness of that stance.

I’ve known a lot of students who like to write poetry, but once they hear about poetry’s technical details, they disconnect from their personal experience with poetry and begin to feel The Fear. That’s too bad because if they could take their personal interest in writing poetry, no matter how bad that poetry might be, and use that energy to tackle the kind of poems they read in class, they’d learn a lot.

Orr says that Fry’s goal is to:

demystify the art without deadening it; to make it seem as open to the interested amateur as “carpentry and bridge and wine and knitting and brass-rubbing and line-dancing and the hundreds of other activities that enrich and enliven the daily toil of getting and spending.”

I like that attitude. Poetry does not require mystical insight or super-human intelligence; rather, while it requires experience and skill to grasp, those things are within the reach of anyone.

Stefanie has an interesting post on the relationship of autobiography and fiction and the “I” of poetry — which, she was taught, is not to be conflated with the “I” of the author. I was taught the same thing, and I have taught that idea in literature classes myself, and I believe it, although I think it’s complicated. I suppose what I really think is that the “I” in the poem is never the same as the poet, but that in some poems the “I” is closer to the poet than in others. I do think there is something to be gained by considering the relationship between poet and poem; I don’t like the idea of walling off the two completely.

I think of Anne Sexton as an interesting case: what do we with “confessional” poets who set out to write about themselves in very personal ways? Even here, in confessional poetry, the “I” of the poem is not Anne Sexton, but the relationship between the poem and the person is awfully interesting and you couldn’t really fully understand Sexton’s work without thinking about her life. But it would also be misleading to assume that the poet and poem fully merge; Sexton still uses a persona. All this makes poetry reading interesting, I think, since a reader can both think about the poems as poems — how do they work or not work as aesthetic objects? — but then can also think about the relationship of the poems to the life, and can therefore have a number of ways of approaching the poem, making the reading experience richer.

Ultimately, I think that fully walling off poem and poet can hide a whole lot of stuff that is really important in literary history: I think it matters that Anne Sexton is a woman writer who is writing against a largely-male tradition of highly formal, abstract, impersonal poetry. She helped open the door to writing that is not only personal (personal in a complicated way, of course), but that discusses women’s experiences in a manner that is new and vital and important.

The other part of the question, for me, is whether there is a clearly-definable “I” belonging to the poet that can match or not match up with the “I” of the poem. In other words, is there even a definable self that can be captured in poetry? You could say that all versions of the self are fictional, and that even if a writer is trying to write about herself as accurately as possible, what she produces is automatically just another fiction, because there is nothing else.

I’m kind of partial to that idea myself. At any rate, Stefanie closes this with question about the wall between poem and poet: “Or should I replace the wall with a split-rail fence covered in morning glories?” Yes!

I finished Jane Hirschfield’s book of poems Given Sugar, Given Salt recently, and thought the book excellent. I’ve posted on a few of the poems here, here, and here. The poems are quiet and meditative and beautiful; they often contemplate objects and our relationship to them, as, for example, in this poem entitled “Ink,” which begins: “Like all liquids, / it is sister to chaos and time: / wanting always / to lose itself in another, / visible only when held in embrace.” As so often in a Hirschfield poem, the ink here is both something clearly other and foreign to human consciousness (“sister to chaos and time”) but also something that, like a human being might, wants to “lose itself in another.”

There is a quiet confidence in these poems, a sense of calmness and serenity. Reading them feels like a form of meditation. They slow you down; you might pick up the book expecting to breeze through a few pages, and you will find yourself re-reading and contemplating what you read, and looking up from the book to ponder, and before you know it, you are staring off into space, deep in thought or feeling. The poems do touch on drama and passion, but underlying those experiences is a deep stillness.

As I’ve noted before, Hirschfield is a Buddhist, and that sensibility pervades the book: the poems exhibit a calmness in the face of unceasing change and suffering. If I could read poems for consolation, I would turn to Hirschfield, who would remind me, I think, that everything changes, and that my troubles are small and fleeting.

Here’s one more poem, entitled “Optimism”:

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam

returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous

tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,

it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.

But out of such persistance arose turtles, rivers,

mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.

For my next poetry read, I plan to take up Jane Kenyon’s book Otherwise

Here’s a poem for book lovers, from Given Sugar, Given Salt:

Each Day I Choose From Among the Steepening Reminders

Each day I choose
From among the steepening reminders
Of all I have failed to finish, failed to begin.
I open a right-hand cover and read the last page.

Phrases severe and perfect rise before me,
Wrung from every extremity of joy and sleek-limbed loss.
Borges, Sinyavsky, Hadewijch, Sappho, Li Po.

More arrive each week, ink sharp as new hunger.

And these are only the books:
The thing already ambered, capable of waiting, turned to words.

I love the way Hirschfield slowly builds up to her point here. At first we don’t know what the “steepening reminders” are; they could be the accumulated reminders of anything she has wanted to do but has left undone. And then in the fourth line we learn she’s talking, in part, about books, all the things she wants to read. We imagine a stack of unread books the speaker looks through longingly, aware of their possibilities. The severe and perfect “phrases” of the fifth line rise up before her also like that stack of books, and the list of names adds to the feeling of weight and potential. But the end of the poem moves back out to a larger view; books, after all, will remain, are fixed and frozen, are waiting there for her when she is ready. What is not, is life itself, the elusive “thing” of the last line, before it is captured and turned into words.

As in many of Hirschfield’s poems, I see evidence here of her Buddhism; she has a keen sense of the importance of the present moment, of all there is to be experienced and absorbed, if one would only pay attention. This poem seems to me to be about the weight of things left undone, the failure to begin and finish things, but also about the conscious choices the speaker makes to do what she does. Each day it is a choice, and the opening line emphasizes her determination to make that choice deliberately. She may fail to do many things, but what she does, she will do because she wants to, because she has chosen it. The poem seems balanced between a sense of responsibility and possibility; those reminders nag at her, like those books she knows she would love but hasn’t found time for yet, but she also takes pleasure in the new choice there is to be made every day.

I’ve had trouble, at times, fitting poetry reading into my life — I’ve always wanted to be the kind of person who reads and appreciates poetry, but the image of myself as a reader and the kind of reader I actually am don’t always match. And it’s not just an image thing — I’ve truly wanted poetry to matter to me.

I think part of my problem with reading poetry has been that I’ve felt I needed to read a bunch all at once — to make my way through a book of poems in a relatively short time. I don’t know why I felt that way. Maybe it has to do with getting impatient if I’m in the middle of a book for too long.

At any rate, I’m trying not to care if it takes me months to read through a book, and to read poems only a couple at a time, for short periods of time here and there. If I try to read a whole bunch of poems at once, I feel like I’m not absorbing them and that there’s no way I will remember them. Even reading only a couple at a time, I may not remember them, but I’m more likely to. If I set out to read only two or three poems at a time, then I’ll spend more time with each one, and really feel like I’m engaging with them.

But that leads me to the other problem I have with reading poetry: I’m uncertain about how long to spend with each one. For me, it’s like looking at art in a museum — I get self-conscious about how long to look at each piece and when to move on. I begin to think about how long I’ve been standing there and how much longer I should stand there, rather than thinking about the art itself. With prose, while I may re-read a passage here and there to understand it better, the expectation is that a person will read through it once. But with poetry, obviously, re-reading is much more important.

I’m in the middle of Jane Hirschfield’s book Given Sugar, Given Salt, and I’ve found that she has many poems that consider the relationship of writing and life — how the page can merge with one’s experiences in the world. Here is one example. I like the image she has of memory as a book where the ink bleeds through the pages and the idea that even our blank pages — or new days — are already written on by our previous experiences:

Waking this Morning Dreamless After Long Sleep

But with this sentence:
“Use your failures for paper.”
Meaning, I understood,
the backs of failed poems, but also my life.

Whose far side I begin now to enter —

A book imprinted without seeming reason,
each blank day bearing on its reverse, in random order,
the mad-set type of another.
December 12, 1960. April 4, 1981. 13th of August, 1974 —

Certain words bleed through to the unwritten pages.
To call this memory offers no solace.

“Even in sleep, the heavy millstones turning.”

I do not know where the words come from,
what the millstones,
where the turning may lead.

I, a woman forty-five, beginning to gray at the temples,
putting pages of ruined paper
into a basket, pulling them out again.

I’ve begun Hirschfield’s book Given Sugar, Given Salt, but I’ve only read four poems, so not enough to comment meaningfully. I’m liking the poems, but I’m also feeling so awed by Mary Oliver that even good poems from other people aren’t quite comparing. But I noticed one from Hirschfield in particular. In her book of essays Nine Gates, she talks about Buddhism a bit, and I heard from a friend that she’s a practicing Buddhist, and that’s what I thought about when I read this:

Red Berries

Again the pyrocanthus berries redden in rain,
as if return were return.

It is not.

The familiar is not the thing it reminds of.
Today’s yes is different from yesterday’s yes.
Even no’s adamance alters.

From painting to painting,
century to century,
the tipped-over copper pot spills out different light;
the cut-open beeves,
their caged and muscled display,
are on one canvas radiant, pure; obscene on another.

In the end it is simple enough —

The woman of this morning’s mirror
was a stranger
to the woman of last night’s;
the passionate dreams of the one who slept
flit empty and thin
from the one who awakens.

One woman washes her face,
another picks up the boar-bristled hairbrush,
a third steps out of her slippers.
That each will die in the same bed means nothing to them.

Our one breath follows another like spotted horses, no two alike.

Black manes and white manes, they gallop.
Piebald and skewbald, eyes flashing sorrow, they too will pass.

The idea that there is no real self, that there’s nothing stable and lasting and that we change from moment to moment and become strangers to ourselves — that idea one can get from the postmodernists, but I prefer to get it from the Buddhists. Because the Buddhists talk about the illusion of the self as a way of ending suffering, not just as a philosophical idea. And the idea is that recognizing the fact that nothing is permanent, that everything changes and is in flux, can help us see that our attachment to things and feelings and ideas causes our suffering. In the end, actually, in the present too, what do our possessions matter? What does our status matter? What do our feelings matter? They will all be gone sooner or later, probably sooner, just like the breath I’m breathing now is already gone.

But this idea is hard to hang on to. It’s all well and good to say I don’t believe in a stable self or that my identity doesn’t actually exist or that there is nothing permanent in the universe whatsoever. But I live and think as though the self is not an illusion and it’s very hard to internalize the idea that it’s otherwise.

That’s what hard times are good for, I think. This spring has been rough for me, mostly because of problems at work, and it’s when I’m struggling and feeling unhappy that I turn to the idea that this will pass, that there is no sense in getting so invested in this idea I have of myself because it’s ultimately meaningless, that what matters is what I’m doing in the moment I’m in, not what I did in the past or what I will do in the future.

I like Hirschfield’s poem because it makes me think about the things that troubled me in the past — which I’ve now practically forgotten — and I remind myself that some day the things I care about now will have faded into the past too.

I finished Mary Oliver’s book American Primitive yesterday, and I recommend it highly. This is her second-to-last poem, and it blew my mind:

The Plum Trees

Such richness flowing
through the branches of summer and into

the body, carried inward on the five
rivers! Disorder and astonishment

rattle your thoughts and your heart
cries for rest but don’t

succumb, there’s nothing
so sensible as sensual inundation. Joy

is a taste before
it’s anything else, and the body

can lounge for hours devouring
the important moments. Listen,

the only way
to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it

into the body first, like small
wild plums.

I was struck by the idea of happiness as being physical first and only then mental. I usually think of it as an aspect of the mind, a mental state. And many think of happiness as a spiritual state. But I love the idea of finding happiness by taking it in through the senses. I think, generally, that attaining a state of happiness isn’t a good goal — it’s so elusive and fleeting and for some reason humans just don’t seem to be made to be happy. And what is happiness, exactly? But I think if one is going to seek happiness, even short experiences of it, seeking it through the physical world is going to be the most reliable way — through experiencing the body intensely and through interaction with the outside world.

The connection between body and mind is built into our language. Oliver’s line about sensual inundation being sensible is breath-taking: she’s playing with word “sense,” its inclusion in both “sensual” and “sensible” and its reference both to the bodily senses and to mental sense, or thinking. Sensual inundation, while it might appear to be excessive, overloading the senses, really is the most sensible, or reasonable, thing to seek. Bodily experience is not something opposed to mental experience — a deeply-felt bodily experience, even one of “disorder and astonishment” that “rattles your thoughts” as Oliver says, is going to strengthen your mind.

I feel like I have things to say about this I don’t have time for now, so I’ll probably come back to this poem and this idea, but I will say that one of the most important things I’ve learned as an adult is to stop privileging mental experiences over physical ones. I grew up in a Christian tradition that is profoundly ambivalent about the body, and it is only by moving away from that tradition that I’ve been able to think about the relationship of mind and body in what I think is a saner way. I like to write about cycling and backpacking because they are part of how I think through these issues: exercise isn’t merely exercise but another way to live in the world. It’s sort of like my body’s way of “reading” — reading is one way the mind understands the world — one way out of many — and walking, running, riding are possibilities for the body.

Here a poem for Poetry Friday, by Mary Oliver, from her book American Primitive:

Moles

Under the leaves, under
the first loose
levels of earth
they’re there — quick
as beetles, blind
as bats, but seen
less than these —
traveling
among the pale girders
of appleroot,
rockshelf, nests
of insects and black
pastures of bulbs
peppery and packed full
of the sweetest food:
spring flowers.
Field after field
you can see the traceries
of their long
lonely walks, then
the rains blur
even this frail
hint of them —
so excitable,
so plush,
so willing to continue
generation after generation
accomplishing nothing
but their brief physical lives
as they live and die,
pushing and shoving
with their stubborn muzzles against
the whole earth,
finding it
delicious.