Poetry

[liv]

According to some, April is National Poetry Month. (Pace siderea: what nation? The Nation of Internet.) My brother is a poet, and I feel like a bad sister for not paying enough attention to poetry, not really having any opinions about it let alone engaging with the form. So I'm going to make some attempt to mark the season.

The other day I was talking to a friend from synagogue and he spontaneously recited WH "Supertramp" Davies' Leisure. It is an utterly terrible poem, it's Hallmarky and bathetic and doesn't even really scan properly. But my friend still has it by heart from his schooldays some three quarters of a century ago. I wonder if when I'm in my 80s I will be able to recite Stopping by woods on a snowy evening (which I learned for a recitation competition when I was seven) or some of the mostly Romantic poetry I learned from my father.

Talking of recitable, rythmic verse, legionseagle posted a rather good Kipling pastiche recently. It's very common to write more or less parodic versions of If, but surprisingly hard to do it well.

I've also been moved by several less formal, almost tending to the blank verse pieces recently. ursulav made a poignant post reaching out to Muslims in the wake of the Boston attacks and the inevitable wave of racism in response. And someone in the comments posted a snippet by Adrienne Rich which maybe helps, if anything can help in the face of shocking violence like that.

And in a locked discussion, a friend linked to a poem called Hair published in Stone Telling. That touched me somewhere very deep. It's not literally true of how I feel about my hair, but it's a poem, it's not a political manifesto for me to sign up to or refute. I'm not genderqueer in the way Gurney describes in that poem. But it's true that my hip-length hair is a part of who I am that is much more significant than the fact that I happen to be female, and it's also true that people make assumptions about my gender because I have very long hair. And I don't think I can claim the fierceness of that closing line: This is the flag I bring to the battles of my days., not for myself, but I am somehow heartened to know that someone out there is saying that.

highlyeccentric is one of the people who have been posting a bunch of poems, not just for April but for the whole of 2013. There's a lot of stuff that is completely new to me, some I bounce off because I don't have the degree of literacy in poetry I do in prose, and some I really like. In particular, this piece entitled The failure of language, by Jacqueline Berger (according to Wiki a contemporary American poet), really meant something to me. I want more people to see:

Everything we love fails, I didn’t tell my students,
if by fails we mean ends or changes,
if by love we mean what sustains us.
Language is what honors the vanishing.
Or is language what slows the leaving?
Or does it only deepen what we know of loss?

I am even considering copying it into my book of true things, which a dear friend gave me a long time ago when I was dealing with loss, loss of a friend and loss of a childish worldview built on a sense of fairness. Except in the 15 years since I've never quite found anything I'm certain enough of to write in the book, it's remained blank. If I wrote poetry, I'd write something about the symbolism of a friend comforting me with the gift of a blank book, and how it still comforts me that I might one day find something true enough and important enough to write down in it.

Comments

[kaberett]

[I passed on the link to this post to Hel, who is absolutely delighted that you liked their poem.]

[liv]

Thank you. I am not sure that like is quite the right word, it's that someone put precise, beautiful words to a very particular type of heartbreak. But it's very cool that the poet appreciates my response, I keep forgetting that writers are real people you can actually interact with on the internet.

[kaberett]

Heh, I'm a little surprised that you have that reaction to writers - I apparently think of you as moving in rather more rarified circles than I!

(-- and Hel and I have known each other since I was seventeen, so there's also the weird two-level thinking, for me, of OBVS THEY'RE REALLY COOL combined with HI I'VE KNOWN YOU SINCE I WAS TINY; navigating spaces laid out for us through reputation is... interesting, and something I am meaning to think about more.)

[pretty_panther]

So many people love poetry and my friends do whole classes on it and I just can't get into it for the life of me. I think it stems from too many hours being forced to explain why curtains were purple when I just thought IDK BECAUSE SHE LIKES THE COLOUR?! XD School scars people for life o.o

[liv]

Yeah, it's all too easy for school education to kill poetry. I was lucky in that by the time I got to school I already loved reading for my own pleasure and I was brought up with my dad reciting poems he loves. So doing ticky-box analysis of why the curtains are purple didn't affect me too badly (in either prose or poetry), I just learned how to do it well enough to get good grades and then ignored it. But I still don't have many good tools for reading poetry, and I do slide off a good proportion of it, just occasionally I find something that works for me.