Poetry and Preservation

me·mo·ri·al [muh-mawr-ee-uhl, -mohr-] noun: something designed to preserve the memory  of a person, event, etc., as a monument or a holiday (from Dictionary.com)

We live in an era when preservation of memory is a function of proximity to a Verizon Hot Spot and access to The Cloud. When tweens capture images on field trips with their iPhones and upload them into PowerPoint projects the next day. When we have developed ways to truncate even the simplest of observations into 140 characters, and taken the vowels out of words we send to two-inch screens in the hands of friends 30 feet away rather than use our voices to communicate them. And it's good, knowing all this, to spend a moment understanding how poetry has served and continues to serve the practices of preservation in this era.


It seems generally accepted that poetry, at some point in our past, was essential in the recording of history. That in addition to being the oral vehicle by which epic fiction was captured, verse was part of the "historian's" tools for remembering and retelling the stories of their people, before even those people had the means or the inclination to commit those stories to paper (or stone, or any medium).

At some point, the act of recording no longer required the mnemonic devices of rhyme and meter, which required poetry, like any art, skill, or technology, to fill other niches in service of preservation, lest it become obsolete. Surely, poetry also morphed in artistic directions as well, which we can consider another time, but poetry continues to have an essential place in the memorializing of person and events.


Some say we are suffering from short attention spans because of the evolution of media; I see it a little differently. Perhaps we no longer need the same kind of attention span - largely because information is more universally and immediately available. However, when something is recognized as worth sharing, it may now shared with a highly distilled accompaniment of language - a tweet with a Tiny URL - requiring the "historian" to find only the essential accompaniment for what is to be shared. But just like there have already emerged a handful of tools for "tweeting" more than 140 characters while still using twitter, poetry will adapt and serve.


Whether indirectly or directly, poetry still serves us as a repository for memories. Maybe it's direct, like an elegy for someone in your community, or veiled in symbol, like "O Captian, My Captain", or indirect like the poppies we purchase outside churches and grocery stores that owe their existence to "In Flanders Fields." Maybe the personal elegy you compose for a departed friend, maybe the poem you turn to when asked to eulogize them. Poetry continues to play a role in memory because of the poet's focus and vision - focus to discern details in and around a person's life or the circumstances of their death, vision to see how those detail can be crafted into something memorable. Worthy of memory, and presented in ways that last. With its crisp and concise language, poetry may even find itself flourishing as it lends itself to being shared in small bits.

Poetry will find its place in today's version of memorialization the same way it adapted to the written word and every other innovation in its communication through the centuries. It's on the poets to make use of the tools and keep it well-crafted and relevant.

Poetry and "Poetry"

Yeah, I've missed half of National Poetry Month. Going to miss the other half, too, I'm afraid. But if participating in our month in the public eye means being lumped in with the likes of Snooki and Dr. Oz, I'd just as soon spend the time on my taxes.

There's a new anthology out, edited by Kathryn and Ross Petras, called "The Anthology of Really Important Modern Poetry: Timeless Poems by Snooki, John Boehner, Kanye West, and Other Well-Versed Celebrities", in which the Petras extract some found poems from the utterings of people normally hunted by paparazzi more than poets. From what was quoted in my local paper I'm sure it's quite funny, and it certainly seems to poke fun at folks who deserved to be so poked. But....

The April 9 headline in the Today section of our Newark Star-Ledger was "Celebs go Shakespeare". Ugh. Even if I accept these artsed-up celeblurbs as poems, this headline is way off the mark. First, it's not like the celebrities set out to be poets, and more importantly, this ain't the bard telling us about "the depth and breadth and height/My soul can reach", this is Carmen Electra saying "I had nice b--bs before --."

Under the headline is the tag "Poetry anthology finds beauty in ridiculousness." Beauty? Really? One of the editors explains "We're like stupidity experts. I am one of the only people who can say I proudly make my living from stupid." I think that's great! If stupid were string beans, MTV could solve world hunger all by itself. And I'm glad someone smart is harvesting that stupidity for some personal gain. But is it beauty? Is breaking Kate Moss's insightful "I just started wearing bras. It's a miracle." into


I just started wearing
bras.
It's a miracle.

creating something beautiful?

I should say that I enjoyed reading NJ journalist Amy Kuperinsky's article - it's funny and smart, the way I expect the Petras intend this anthology to be taken. But just like Kuperinsky's good journalism isn't poetry, neither (IMHO) are the creations the Petras have collected likely to rise to the level of poetry. Why do I think this? Well, Wikipedia defines poetry as "a form of literary art which uses the aesthetic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning." as the definition of poetry. Can repurposed celebrity quotes rise to that? I'm skeptical.

Now I hear you saying: Is this really that big a deal? What is it about this book that gives me an itch I can't scratch? Well, the things is that it's being celebrated as part of National Poetry Month. To be fair, when 2012 Dodge tickets went on sale, that was featured with equal prominence (if not quite equal length or equivalent imagery) in the Star-Ledger. My worry is that, just like my friends in places other than New Jersey seemed to believe at there just must be at least some in The Sopranos, people will believe the finds in this book must be real modern poetry.

And is it? Well, I promise to take a stroll through the book when it arrives in my library system, and if I find anything that sways me toward accepting these as poems I'll tweet my approval. Until then, I'll stick with Poetry Daily, AAP, and Your Daily Poem for my NatPoMo headlines.

Where Poetry Intersects Precision

"The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." - Mark Twain

In my interview last year on Poetic Lines with Elizabeth Lund, I commented on how one element of poetry that most appeals to me is its precision. This comment has created some interesting discussion, especially among my technologist friends, as the definition of precise seems to argue against the condition of poetry - good poetry, at least - which creates opportunity for the reader to insert their own experience and develop their own interpretation.


That confusion seems reasonable, when you know the definition of precise is the state of "being just that and no other", to be "definite or exact in statement, as a person." But one can be precise in certain elements without being rigidly defined in others or from all points of view. Consider the Mona Lisa, in many ways a precise portrait of a woman, yet filled with elements that encourage speculation ("Who is she?" Is she smiling?" Why that background?" Did she have eyebrows?"). How about the pointillist paintings of George Seurat, which at the smallest detail are precise elements of color but which at a slight distance back combine to appear to the eye as other colors, and a little further back become characters in a scene, and which a few steps back from that are a complex snapshot open to the art of the storyteller (Sunday in the Park with George, anyone?)


How is that precision lends itself to interpretation and exploration? Precision in detail creates a vividness that frees the reader or viewer to focus their attention on something larger. This also requires precision in execution, precision in specifics without pushiness in purpose. Poetry instructors will steer students toward concreteness in word selection (precision!) and focus on images - creating in language the same situation that a viewer could have in front of a great painting. All the best guidance I've received in my progression as a writer has been to set the scene up, then step away without telling people what I see in it. It took several encounters with editors telling me they wanted my poems - minus the last two lines - for me to get that. Leave the interpretation to the reader.


Precision in art is a sign of craft, like Seurat's dots and DaVinci's brushstrokes. I find it always something to strive for, no matter what I'm writing about, and I think it shows in which poems last and which don't.

Where Poetry Intersects ... Place

There's a diner that figures prominently in my poem "Surviving the Flood". I tell a little about meeting a man there and engaging him in a debate about the "meaning" of the flood. Whenever chance takes me past it, I recall immediately and powerfully the moment the poem came into existence and the story of my conversation with the opinionated old man. Only problem is, it never happened.

The diner's not even a diner, actually, it's a small deli on a suburban street, and I've never so much as used its parking lot to make a U-turn, let alone stepped inside it for a braunschweiger on rye. Yet every time I pass the place, I remember the days when northern New Jersey was a maze of cone-lined work-arounds and so many people were suffering with the effects of our swollen rivers, and I remember vividly the first lines of "Surviving" taking shape in the silence of my idling car.

Is it a bad thing that I fabricated a diner and its small population of characters from a neighborhood delicatessen? The deli very much was part of the inspiration for the story of the poem; there's a truth in there, but I took quite a poetic liberty with the narrative. I think Stevens ("Poetry is the supreme fiction, Madame") and Picasso ("Art is a lie that makes us realize truth") are on my side in this debate, and who are any of us to argue?

A more interesting question for me is the power of the connection of place. It is absolutely true that I can't pass this little deli without experiencing again the moment of the poem's birth. And that's not the only potherem of mine that has such an impact on me. For that matter, I have that relationship with other people's poems, too. When I'm visiting Massachusetts, there's corner on a road I frequent that is like a tap from which "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" pours. There's one supermarket (an Acme, ironically) that always launches me into BJ Ward's "Mythology at the Shop-Rite". Hopefully I needn't articulate where the Great Falls of Paterson take me.

This has become very interesting to me. In To The Ones Who Must Be Loved, many of the poems have very specific places of origin, and since I still live in the midst of those places, I still live in the midst of the poems, some of which I wrote a dozen years ago. And when I visit my college campus, which I do several times a year, I recall vividly even the poems I've long-since buried for being sentimental nonsense (or reminders of people no longer in my life) - and not just my own poems, and not just famous poems or poems I know well. I walk past a particular dorm and remember a poem by one of my coeditors of our incarnation of the college litmag. And I bet he could tell me about the night it was born as vividly as I remember it. I rarely think of that poem any other time, but when I'm there, its title is as clear to my mind's eye as as the first time I read it. In 1985.

Is it that way with many poets and poems? Your own or other works that have been important to you in your writing travels?  I've heard it said that among the senses, smell is the most powerful trigger of memory. That may be so, but I'm leaning toward believing that sight has its own particular power, and that place is a more powerful promoter of poems.

Poetry and Interpretation (Or Not)

Though we tended to be perceived as very similar men (which I suppose we probably were), my father and I did not share a great number of common interests. There were the ones he trained into me (like being a Mets and Jets fan. Thanks, Dad.), and one or two that I adopted so we'd have something we could do together when I was old and smart enough to want those things, but for the most parts, our definitions of fun were fairly divergent. He was all Statler Brothers, I was all Billy Joel. He was about solos, I was about the band. He preferred blondes, I preferred brunettes. And he never really figured out why I liked to write and why I called it "poetry" when it didn't rhyme.

Not that there weren't things we enjoyed together. We played many satisfying card games together - spades, pinochle, sheephead, euchre. We could both lose half a day to a good bit of historical nonfiction. We both habitually looked for the algorithms that defined number sequences. But I always suspected that we came to things a bit differently, and stuck with them for different reasons.

Near the end of his life, I discovered my father liked Scent of a Woman. We never discussed it, but I always had the feeling he best enjoyed the parts where Al Pacino was giving someone hell. It wasn't all that big a stretch to imagine my father applying a ranger choke hold as part of defending something he felt strongly about. But those aren't the parts of the movie that attract me. I liked watching Chris O'Donnell be honorably passive-aggressive, giving people a more gentle grief than the caricature his costar was portraying. It used to bug me a bit, that even when we agreed, my father and I, we disagreed (and on the golf course, the card table, and the homework desk, it was clear this was frequently the case). It took a long time to just get comfortable that there was something we could appreciate together, to enjoy for no other reason than that we both enjoyed it.

Fast-forwarding, I recently shared poem with someone who's known me for quite a while but only recently discovered my writing hobby, and this precipitated a predictable discussion ("Wow, you really write poetry?" "Is this the kind of poem you usually write?" "Do you read Good Housekeeping? I saw a poem in there last year."). This well-intentioned but generally uninformed sort of dialog has at times been a mild irritant for me (which I'm sure you can trace in the archive without too much trouble), and it surprised me not to have that reaction this time. My recent rediscovery of Poe  has me reliving some dusty memories that have softened my edges a bit.

This includes experiences like a college classroom debate about "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", in which the professor posited a possible interpretation of "His house is in the village, though/He will not see me stopping here" as an atheistic comment. I remember that students who hadn't had a strong opinion about anything in the past 2 months were suddenly agitated and vocal. I also remember them breaking into two camps, basically "all real poets are skeptics" versus "Robert Frost is Norman Rockwell." I don't remember how it ended, but it's evidence of why "Woods" is a great poem - it evokes interpretation and passion. Decades later, I still don't know what Frost meant. It's not important to my connection with the poem.

While it's nice to have a shared mindset with someone, I realize that's a basis for forming a club, not for creating great poetry (or art in general). I've finally gotten comfortable accepting the "This can't be poetry, I get this!" response and people's confidence that they know exactly what I was trying to say. It's good just to be happy that they have a strong response to my poems. At least we can have that much in common.

Poetry and Christmas

Like many people, I've had precious little time to fit the hobby in lately. There's so much to do (I'm off to whip up a batch of pfeffernüsse in a minute), but I did want to take a minute to ponder this intersection that's so important to me.

A holiday so steeped in history, faith, and sentiment is hard to "make new", and hard to mine for content that is genuinely interesting (to others, and even to onesself on a second reading!). There are two Christmas poems in To The Ones Who Must Be Loved, though neither is really about the holiday - one is about the effect having a child has on a new father's perspective, and the other is about how that perspective is challenged and changed when a child is seriously ill. Christmas provides a context and a vocabulary with which to comment on these views, which may be the best way to cut through the dreck that so frequently spills out of Christmas poems. And many other poems, but that's for a different day.

The classic and immediate poem that comes to mind is A Visit From Saint Nicholas (even if you don't know it by that title...), well worth a read in the original form: He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot / And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot / A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back / And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack. An oldie (first appeared in 1823), this wonderful old poem has been parodied so much it's lost some of its luster, but solid narrative metrical verse, and it does have some terrific images that someone get overlooked: As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly / When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky / So up to the house-top the coursers they flew / With the sleigh full of Toys, and St. Nicholas too.

Those who sing in church are no doubt familiar with "I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day", but singing the first couple of versus omits the political context of Longfellow's poem. The whole story of the poem reeks with despair, but you don't need that whole story to understand the Civil War melancholy that set up the hopeful of the poem: Then from each black, accursed mouth / The cannon thundered in the South / And with the sound / The carols drowned / Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

I try every hear to produce a poem on the theme. Some years emerging as an exploration of faith, some years as a more secular family experience. This year, I'm informed primarily by my daughter's recent studies on the great Edgar Allen Poe. I figured if anything could keep me from wallowing in sentiment, it would be clinging to a Poe construct. I leave it to you to decided if I succeeded.

And I leave it to you to have a joyous holiday!

Poetry and.... Thanksgiving

Today I am grateful for the life of a man I barely knew. 

Fausto, a member of my parish, passed away this week at the age of 82. I knew him a little, which is to say I knew him at 9:00 mass, where he was an usher, and I am a lector. When my family first began attending this mass, I formed an instant opinion of him as a gentle but disagreeable sort - a curmudgeon in the most commonly-held sense of the word. He moved slowly, rarely smiled, and gave the smallest nods in response to greetings.

As most people do, we always sit in or near the same place at our regular mass, and as I got to know the people around us - long-time parishioners all, many older than us - in the same demographic as Fausto - I began to notice the greetings, silent and subtle, that passed among them as he would pass at the end of the communion line. I don't know if i ever saw him smile, but I surely saw my fellow parishioners smile as he passed and nodded, passed and whispered.

When I started to lector, gathering with the ushers, priests, and other lay ministers before mass, and started to listen to Fausto in the company of other men of faith, I realized this was a man who complained about his tribulations from time to time, but rarely had a negative word toward anyone else. And when he permitted it to be seen, he had a smile that was impossible to return in kind.

After a while, I noticed him interacting with the alter servers - boys and girls of middle school age, the most likely group to shrink from an uninviting adult. Without fail, he was gracious and funny with them, and they with him.

And in those few conversations I had with him, I found a man of confidence and clarity, joyful and thankful, welcoming, and proud to serve in his role in our community.

Only today, after his passing, have I learned that he was educated as a lawyer, worked for 25 years in an industry parallel to my own, and shared his passion for the game as a 25-year soccer coach. The last I probably should have guessed from how his energy level rose when the World Cup came up....

I'm grateful for having known him and having received words of encouragement and praise from such a worldly soul. I'm also grateful for the chance he gave me, and continues to give me, to be aware of the evolution of my own attitudes and interactions through understanding my small relationship with him. I'm most grateful for his example, that of confidence and service, accomplishment and community.

Which brings me to my favorite Thanksgiving poem, offered with gratitude for your readership, for your finding something of value here, and for the chance to connect with you, to be a small part of your life, and to have you as a part of mine.

Te Deum
by Charles Reznikoff

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.

Not for victory
but for the day's work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.

(courtesy poets.org)

Happy Thanksgiving.