(I'm rerunning this January post in honor of today, National Poetry Day)
"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash." ~Leonard Cohen
So it seems I'm on a mission. There must be a way to redeem the reputation and enjoyment of poetry in this country!
Unlike other cultures where poetry is highly revered and simply woven in the fabric of everyday living, there is more and more a lack of even the mention of it in my own America. My parents used to ask me, "Why can't you just say it straight out? Why do you have to wrap it up in all that silliness?" Dad was a strict linear thinker, you see. To be honest, I was surprised at Mother's attitude because she quite literally sugar-coated everything!
Melanie Lynn Moro-Huber writes, in the New York Quarterly Issue 65, "For those who find poetry boring, I would claim that you can't avoid experiencing poetry - you are alive. As you breathe, if there are moments when you become aware that you are breathing - that is, in essence, poetry."
Mary Oliver, in A Poetry Handbook, says, "Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed."
My own view is that poetry reaches that unseen, elusive space between shadow and soul. You'll know it's been touched when you get goosebumps, draw a sharp breath, or become very still. If you find yourself jumping up, pumping air with your fist, that space has been earthquaked!
Recently, an essay by my brilliant friend, the esteemed British poet and author, Oscar Sparrow showcases the problem in a brand new light:
"VISIBILITY is the entire issue. No one will like every poet. Having rubbed shoulders with some real “up the backside” airy fairy poets I can report that I have not liked many of them. My favourite poet is an Indie like me. Poetry has machine gunned itself in the feet and both legs with its inaccessible elitism. Dear old Pam Ayres, Benny Hill and popular music composers have kept the comatosed patient alive in the public mind. Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond, et al have done more to keep the concept of poetry alive than any poet laureate. We poets must remember that this is a world where in many households either a stereo playing music or a TV playing across 300 channels occupies the whole environment while anyone is awake. It has been a revolution that the “Greats” could not have shouted down. OK Mr. Tennyson – your friend died and you wrote a poem – so what? There’ve been 4 murders and a car crash since lunch time on channel 18 and no one is writing a soppy poem about that!
My own view is that poets have still got the guns. They have the ristretto fix in the internet café. The new media of music and video mix is there to be taken. Folks may never again sit under the summer boughs with a book of verse. They will pick up a phrase or an idea if it is delivered to their antennae and we fellow poet citizens of that same world put it there for them."
In another blog Oscar writes, "Oh - poetry, how your tiny voice whispers amongst the tumult of it all. Yes – and in a sense the whole of ART is a tumult with its pantheons of schools, critics, apologists, galleries, libraries, soothsayers and junkies. All of it, verbal and pictorial, reduces to the language with which we speak to ourselves. Inchoate and debased, it is the pornography of seething crowds and the frustration of intelligence before the dumb shrine of mystery. Only poetry works. Only poetry works."
Oscar writes further in another essay, "The exhibition was set in the most beautiful landscape and being a poet I found myself wandering here and there, looking under the rattling stones of the river bed and the jumbled contents of my own consciousness for that key capable of opening the experience to my inner self. In my mind I ran a piece of prose, written in a blog A Fragile Thread by the American poet Jo VonBargen. She too had been wandering and engaging in a deconstruction of such times which illuminated this mental process so agonising and exquisite to poets. “In the silence, mysteries yield. They almost tell their deepest secrets. You wonder if this is a flaw in nature, a sort of missing link that might randomly connect truth with questions.”
In Front-Line 2011 he writes, "I was a cop because it was a job that I thought would give me stuff to write about. I loved Brixton and South London. It was a cacophony and a choir, a rhythm and a rag-bag. It was a fist in the face and a handshake." Listen to the fabulously vivid poetry in that prose!
"Always be a poet, even in prose.” ~Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare, Intimate Journals, 1864"
And, so. There are many reasons people see no value in poetry, not the least of which being that our culture is accustomed now to being entertained. Poetry challenges readers and forces them to participate, to pay attention. I think, as a poet, I must work on making poetry accessible via less obscurity, well-honed clarity, and a willingness to get it out there in the new media to which Oscar refers. As my friend, Christina Carson, has recently pointed out in an essay, I need to firmly set my intent so the Universe can respond. Yes! I WILL find the pulse. I will.
--Jo VonBargen 2012
"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash." ~Leonard Cohen
So it seems I'm on a mission. There must be a way to redeem the reputation and enjoyment of poetry in this country!
Unlike other cultures where poetry is highly revered and simply woven in the fabric of everyday living, there is more and more a lack of even the mention of it in my own America. My parents used to ask me, "Why can't you just say it straight out? Why do you have to wrap it up in all that silliness?" Dad was a strict linear thinker, you see. To be honest, I was surprised at Mother's attitude because she quite literally sugar-coated everything!
Melanie Lynn Moro-Huber writes, in the New York Quarterly Issue 65, "For those who find poetry boring, I would claim that you can't avoid experiencing poetry - you are alive. As you breathe, if there are moments when you become aware that you are breathing - that is, in essence, poetry."
Mary Oliver, in A Poetry Handbook, says, "Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed."
My own view is that poetry reaches that unseen, elusive space between shadow and soul. You'll know it's been touched when you get goosebumps, draw a sharp breath, or become very still. If you find yourself jumping up, pumping air with your fist, that space has been earthquaked!
Recently, an essay by my brilliant friend, the esteemed British poet and author, Oscar Sparrow showcases the problem in a brand new light:
"VISIBILITY is the entire issue. No one will like every poet. Having rubbed shoulders with some real “up the backside” airy fairy poets I can report that I have not liked many of them. My favourite poet is an Indie like me. Poetry has machine gunned itself in the feet and both legs with its inaccessible elitism. Dear old Pam Ayres, Benny Hill and popular music composers have kept the comatosed patient alive in the public mind. Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond, et al have done more to keep the concept of poetry alive than any poet laureate. We poets must remember that this is a world where in many households either a stereo playing music or a TV playing across 300 channels occupies the whole environment while anyone is awake. It has been a revolution that the “Greats” could not have shouted down. OK Mr. Tennyson – your friend died and you wrote a poem – so what? There’ve been 4 murders and a car crash since lunch time on channel 18 and no one is writing a soppy poem about that!
My own view is that poets have still got the guns. They have the ristretto fix in the internet café. The new media of music and video mix is there to be taken. Folks may never again sit under the summer boughs with a book of verse. They will pick up a phrase or an idea if it is delivered to their antennae and we fellow poet citizens of that same world put it there for them."
In another blog Oscar writes, "Oh - poetry, how your tiny voice whispers amongst the tumult of it all. Yes – and in a sense the whole of ART is a tumult with its pantheons of schools, critics, apologists, galleries, libraries, soothsayers and junkies. All of it, verbal and pictorial, reduces to the language with which we speak to ourselves. Inchoate and debased, it is the pornography of seething crowds and the frustration of intelligence before the dumb shrine of mystery. Only poetry works. Only poetry works."
Oscar writes further in another essay, "The exhibition was set in the most beautiful landscape and being a poet I found myself wandering here and there, looking under the rattling stones of the river bed and the jumbled contents of my own consciousness for that key capable of opening the experience to my inner self. In my mind I ran a piece of prose, written in a blog A Fragile Thread by the American poet Jo VonBargen. She too had been wandering and engaging in a deconstruction of such times which illuminated this mental process so agonising and exquisite to poets. “In the silence, mysteries yield. They almost tell their deepest secrets. You wonder if this is a flaw in nature, a sort of missing link that might randomly connect truth with questions.”
In Front-Line 2011 he writes, "I was a cop because it was a job that I thought would give me stuff to write about. I loved Brixton and South London. It was a cacophony and a choir, a rhythm and a rag-bag. It was a fist in the face and a handshake." Listen to the fabulously vivid poetry in that prose!
"Always be a poet, even in prose.” ~Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare, Intimate Journals, 1864"
And, so. There are many reasons people see no value in poetry, not the least of which being that our culture is accustomed now to being entertained. Poetry challenges readers and forces them to participate, to pay attention. I think, as a poet, I must work on making poetry accessible via less obscurity, well-honed clarity, and a willingness to get it out there in the new media to which Oscar refers. As my friend, Christina Carson, has recently pointed out in an essay, I need to firmly set my intent so the Universe can respond. Yes! I WILL find the pulse. I will.
--Jo VonBargen 2012
