Po’try

Fine, fine. I’ll give it a go.

The first poem I remember reading was…
Just with my eyes? “Where the Sidewalk Ends.” Really understanding that there’s more to poetry than rhyme and a meter? “The Waste Land,” senior year of high school. I remember writing, in green ballpoint pen, on the top of the first page, “THIS is poetry???”

I was forced to memorize numerous poems in school and…
…this statement is not as true as it should be. Kids should have to memorize far more poetry than they do. The only poetry I ever had to memorize before college was in French; to this day I can still recite “La Cigale et la Fourmi” and wow my friends in the French Department here (thank you Madame Amiry). But memorizing these poems and the Middle and Old English verses I learned by heart in college gave me something more than brilliant party conversation material. Memorization heightens awareness. Knowing each word, each pause, each punctuation mark and accent made me think about them more, makes me feel them more. On a practical level, such close attention taught me the grammar of each language better than any fill-in-the-blank quizzes or parsing assignments; I also thing that memory games like this help strengthen memory itself. But on a soulfully practical level, I feel like I could really only begin to read a poem once I’d memorized it. It’s partially the fact that you have to spend a good deal of time with a poem to memorize it (if you’re me anyway), and partially the power that comes from knowing how it all fits together and what comes before what, being able to keep the whole poem in your head simultaneously at the same time as knowing how it runs chronologically. If only I had the discipline to keep memorizing poetry now…it makes me wonder how my poetry papers would be different if I memorized each verse before I wrote.

I read poetry because…
I am looking for an expression of something I feel strongly, with or without knowing it.

A poem I’m likely to think about when asked about a favorite poem…
is Wordworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” It’s so comforting and homey and absolutely revolutionary and transgressive all at once. And probably more importantly, Wordsworth and I agree about the importance of place.

I write poetry, but…
…nobody is ever meant to see it. It’s me venting, and is very teenage-angsty. No pretensions of greatness. Line breaks occur entirely for dramatic effect and have nothing to do with meter. In her self-effacing introduction to “I Won’t Be Your Yoko Ono,” Dar Williams captures exactly the combination of fondness and contempt that I have for my poetry.

My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature…
In some ways, a lot. Intensity. It’s just so rich. I wonder if a poem could survive if it weren’t in some way like chocolate ganache. But I also like to question why we don’t call prose poetry; in children’s literature, for example, they overlap a lot. Is The Cat in the Hat a poem? Is Goodnight, Moon? Czeslaw Milosz wrote prose poetry, as did Baudelaire. How does the opening to Bleak House differ from these works? Indeed, how does it differ from the opening to “Prufrock”?

I find poetry…
…everywhere I look? on the third shelf up on my big bookcase? difficult?

The last time I heard poetry…
We read most of the poems on our syllabus aloud this semester in Late Victorian lit. It’s amazing how few of us know how to read poetry aloud (me included, definitely). One or two of the readings were okay. But we don’t know how to relish words without making it sound forced. Hence we either over- or undercompensate, with effects that leave the poet turning in his grave and the rest of us squirming in our seats. It’s a delicate and difficult and rigid balance–but somehow it feels so right and free and easy when you finally hear it.

I think poetry is like…
…similes.