Poetry

What is the power that poetry has on us?  Even in a second language, even though studded with strange words, unfamiliar images, obscure metaphors, even without a deep sense of the sounds patterns or the rhythmic cadences, even when dealing with special topics and peculiar conditions, poetry can pierce us intolerably, make us writhe, and puncture the sacs of feeling we keep secure behind our ribs.

I saw poetry overcome all these barriers recently, and work its magic on a student. It may be that what comes through from poetry read on the page, or recited, communicates, at minimum, the conviction that words have a throw weight beyond their bare informational content. As exposition or story or reflection, a poem seems to link certain disparate satisfactions and patterns of significance into a meaningful complex in a way no other form of utterance does, a way that speaks to and of the livingness of our lives.

We read the old Scottish ballad Sir Patrick Spens:

The king sits in Dumferlin town / Drinking the blood-red wine: / Oh where will I get a good sailor / To sail this ship of mine?

We moved on to Lisel Mueller's The Possessive Case:

Your father's mustache / My brother's keeper / La plume de ma tante / Le monocle de mon oncle 

Thereafter, Sharon Olds' I Go Back to May, 1937:

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges. / I see my father strolling out / under the ochre sandstone arch, the / red tiles glinting like bent / plates of blood behind his head. I /...

Next in the anthology we were perusing, the classic Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden:

...What did I know, what did I know / Of love's austere and lonely offices?

We parted after sharing Kate Ryan's Masterworks of Ming, with its wonderful turn:

 ...so nice / adjunct / to dinner // or washing / a daughter...

Each one had for each of us a special delight, compounded by the pleasure the other was taking in these word structures.

Yesterday, the power poem was Ted Hughes' The Thought Fox with its climactic

...Till with the sudden hot stink of fox, / It enters the dark hole of the head. / The window is starless still, / The clock ticks, the page is printed.

This all began two days ago when I illustrated the use of past participles as adjectives with

The window, broken in pieces, offered no obstacle to the cold wind.

Inadvertently, there was live poetry in that throw-away lesson example. I should be more careful.

We talked about pleasures of reading poems, of being read to, of reading aloud, of repeating in entirety or by special line, of talking about the poems with someone else, of savoring images and turns of phrase, of enjoying the peculiar feeling that each poem evokes, of feeling touched in some tender place by a poem, of being transported beyond oneself for some short period of time.

We did more in our classes than this, of course, but poetry, too little appreciated, too seldom shared, made our encounter special. That you were moved by these word--in English--affirms for me not just the power of the art form but also your unusual receptivity. I too am moved.