“I hate poetry.”
I hear it all the time from people, but I don’t think it’s poetry people hate. I think that’s impossible. Poetry predates literacy. It is an old, old art form. I think it’s ingrained in human beings to love poetry, to write poetry, the same way it’s ingrained in us to love stories, to respond to them, to need them to help contextualize our own lives and to make the basic, brutal narrative arc we all share more bearable.
I am born. I die.
So why do so many people go against their very nature (I know, I know: that’s a contentious word.) and repudiate poetry, repudiate themselves? All right, you might not agree at this point. You, too, might hate poetry and already have taken umbrage with my tone. You think I’m being superior, snotty, a swot (as the British say, and I wish we did. Isn’t that a fantastic word and immediately comprehendible?)
Swot. Cottage. Ogre. Diamond. Sorb. Lentisk.
I’m not rambling. I’m answering your unasked question: I’m telling you why I love poetry. Poetry is words as instruments; poetry is the beauty of sound. Poetry is language made lovely and the world made lovely through it, even the ugly bits, even the impossible, painful part of that narrative arc, when we find ourselves halfway between being born and dying: the suffering part made bearable by poetry.
And I admit: this is not the case for most poetry today. Most poetry today is cerebral, cold, intellectualized. It will not give you a shoulder to cry on; it will tell you you are too intense and stare at you clinically while you blow your nose with a kleenex. There isn’t any physical body in it, and that’s been my complaint for years, it’s neurotic, just an overworked brain. And so, years ago I turned to older poetry, poetry that is full of melancholy and good cheer and lust, too; poetry that could stand up alongside any hiphop lyric of the modern age. When Chaucer tells Rosemunde “she been of all beaute shryne,” he isn’t talking about her conversation.
Despite my tone, I think there’s hope. Slowly I’ve found living poets to admire and learn from: poets like Nick Flynn and Michael Blackburn, a new obsession of mine, not to mention my friend Rosalind Jana, who recently won the Hippocrates Youth Poetry Prize. It’s the old poets though, who are my oldest, goldest friends. Little wonder that my love for the older stuff leaks through into my own poetry.
When I wrote “Israfel Updated” live today at Every Day Poets here, yes, I was sampling Edgar Allen Poe, but he in turn was sampling the Koran. (Well, sort of.) I recently read this fantastic article decrying sampling in poetry, a loss of an original poetics, but I think what Calvin Bedient was writing about in his excellent piece is the kind of swotty sampling that is done to show you how very brilliant and cultured the writer is, and thus, we do not respond well to it, to that reactionary tone of superiority, but I hope my poem doesn’t fall into that category.
It is filled with love for Poe, and my capacity to admire my heroes, dead or alive, is one of the strongest aspects of my personality. I cried when I was 13, because I would never get to meet Shakespeare. Okay, it’s a long story that involves the novel Tam Lin, featuring a host of immortal Shakespearean actors who go to college in the Midwest, not to mention feeling like an outsider at a Southern, conservative school…and anyway…the question (Calvin Bedient’s) question should be, not why do people hate poetry, but “how did we get to this place, where concept has trumped feeling?”
Do you enjoy any poetry? What did you think of my poem? Did it bother you that it refers to another, earlier poem or did you enjoy that aspect of it?
This poem is dedicated to the late, great Every Day Poet editor Robert V. Herrnfeld whose comment that my poem made her want to go back and read the original Israfel made me smile and say to myself, “Yes, yes, exactly! She gets it!” There aren’t many people who get us. I mourn her passing.
Isabella David Vintage 