"Fools like me" Poetry

 The literary world should take warning– I have started writing poetry again. I’m not entirely sure why as I haven’t written any poetry for some years. Perhaps it is just that I am writing more these days as a result of my blogging and other activities so that part of my brain, or my soul, has reactivated.  Whether I shall publish those poems here, or anywhere else is another matter, but it’s doubtful. Poetry can often just be another way of talking to yourself, so perhaps I am my poetry’s only appropriate audience.

My friend’s mother is a retired English teacher. I was working at a school at one time where the Grade Eight classes (12-13 yr olds) would rotate and so one teacher would teach the one unit to the four or five classes that made up the year, and I was teaching poetry. She said if her school had that system, she would choose the poetry unit. She loved, as I recall her telling me, introducing students to the uses of poetry. She would show them the Memoriam section from the paper to demonstrate how poetry worked: when our emotions go beyond mere words, we resort to poetry. Those columns were full of poems, original and copied, written and placed by people trying to cope with grief. I immediately stole that idea for my own classes. It was also her that introduced me to Yeats – and I never thanked her.

Poetry is a complex beast. In the twentieth century it underwent the same process as some of the plastic arts. Poems went from formal structured affairs to whatever collection of words spilled any which was onto the page that you nominated as a poem. Which, like most changes in life, was a change for better and for worse. Structure did not save us from bad poetry, and more free form poetry does not prevent good poems being written.  But I do admit a preference for more structured poetry. I think the extra rigour involved in following forms tends to produce better poems. Do read Stephen Fry’s (look him up if you don’t know who he is) The Ode less travelled for an informative ‘How-to’ on poetry forms.

Another side-effect of my poetry writing is that I finally got around to reading a book I bought ages ago, How to read a poem: And fall in love with poetry, by Edward Hirsch. It is a wonderful book and reopened my eyes and ears and heart to poetry again; I can put it no other way. Like Dickens, poems - even short ones - demand our full focus. Hirsch, a professor of English, critic and poet himself, takes us through various types of poetry and his passionate response to them. His responses are so detailed and loving it creates a need in his reader to read poems again to try to bring their own response to a similar level. His examples are wide ranging in time and style and most pleasingly for me, languages. Translation is a difficult art, and poetry trickier than most, but it was a pleasure to be introduced to a group of poems, poets and traditions of which I had been unaware.

Hirsch quotes Ezra Pound, “Emotion is what endures.” Certainly the poems that we remember, that come to us in half-remembered fragments in moments unprepared, are the ones that struck a chord in us when we read them. And the best poetry I think still maintains its links to the vocal tradition and responds well to being read aloud.  I am reading Robert Fangles’ translation of the Iliad at the moment and it screams to be read aloud and so at times I do. Not a bad way to practice diction either. And to feel those words and phrases in your mouth is to be part of a tradition, and a joy, that dates back millennia. Of course, the Iliad comes directly from a vocal tradition but Yeats, Frost, Cavafy, Hughes, Dawe, Oodgeroo and Heany all reward reading out loud. And that’s just a sample off the top of my head, there are thousands more.

And the lyric poem, which came from song , can lead back again. Here is Constantine P Cavafy’s The God abandons Antony. Antony thought himself under the protection of the god Bacchus. At midnight before Octavian’s final attack on Alexandria and Antony’s death, a Bacchanalia passed by Antony’s window, which the historian Plutarch saw as Bacchus leaving Antony to his fate. Cavafy’s narrator watches Antony as the procession passes:

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear

an invisible procession going by

with exquisite music, voices,

don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,

work gone wrong, your plans

all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.

As one long prepared, and graced with courage,

say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.

Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say

it was a dream, your ears deceived you:

don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.

As one long prepared, and graced with courage,

as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,

go firmly to the window

and listen with deep emotion, but not

with the whining, the pleas of a coward;

listen—your final delectation—to the voices,

to the exquisite music of that strange procession,

and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing. 

Leonard Cohen, who started life as a poet and whose lyrics are haunting and mysterious yet direct, took this poem and adapted it into a song about the end of a love affair:

A cycle of beauty, a coming together of history, poetry and music, myth, and emotion. Whose heart could this not move?