Crude and Rude Rules for Reading Poetry

I wear the same four shirts to work. This is because I cannot be trusted to dress myself. I don’t own orange and purple because I would try to match them. In college my room mates had to forcibly prevent me from walking out in sweats and a trench coat. I still don’t see what the problem was, but I’m assuming there was one because they sat on me. Fashion is an art I will never understand.

I feel the exact same way about poetry. Give me a piece of prose and I’ll tell you exactly how I feel about it, my reasons for emoting, what worked, what didn’t, what kind of mood the author was in when they wrote it and whether they were loved as a child. Kafka wasn’t. Nabokov was. Maybe a little too well. (I’m sorry. That was crass.) I'll be making most of it up, but at least there's something to make up.

But poetry? Unless a poem is so bad it’s good—say, rhymes baleen with spleen—it’s above my head. If someone tells me a poem is good, I nod. If someone tells me a poem’s bad I nod. If one person tells me the poem is good and one person tells me it’s bad, I flip a coin.

Not for the faint of heart

I hate that. I really hate getting owned, but it’s one thing to get owned by your wardrobe. It’s another thing to get owned by poetry.

So I decided to hack the system.

New rule: All poetry is shit unless it falls into one of these three categories.

1) Gorgeous

What makes a poem gorgeous? I dunno. What makes a person gorgeous? Cheekbones? Jawline? Graceful hands? It’s like that with poetry too. Sometimes gorgeous means badass imagery. Sometimes it means a nameless charm that compels you to read line after line. It’s a highly subjective quality, it changes from person to person, mood to mood, but you know it when you see it. And sometimes you change your mind. That’s allowed too.

This is gorgeous:

I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

-Poetry, Pablo Neruda

This is not:

I slouch in bed

Beyond the streaked trees of my window,

All groves are bare.

Locusts and poplars change to unmarried women.

Sorting slate from anthracite

Between railroad ties:

The yellow bearded winter of the depression

Is still alive somewhere, an old man

Counting his collection of bottle caps

In a tarpaper shack under the cold trees

Of my grave.

-Two Hangovers, James Wright

But, Owl, you’re comparing a description of the heavens to a description of well, lying in bed being depressed. Yes. But Neruda also does depressed, and it’s still gorgeous.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

-Walking Around, Pablo Neruda

Two Hangovers falls into the category of poems that make me angry, poems that are clever and sleek in their poeminess, and I read them and I do not understand what I am supposed to get out of them. Under the new rules this is a shit poem. Sorry Wright.

2) Catchy

Catchy like one of those top hits played on the radio 24/7. There are fancy words about meter and rhythm to describe this, but I’m going to avoid them. My friends used to drum out meter on my head whenever I had to write a sonnet for class. I have done my very best to forget everything I know about meter and rhyme.

Catchy means you read the poem and the words spin through your head over and over again. Dylan Thomas’s "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" is catchy. Sylvia Plath’s  “Mad Girl’s Love Song” is catchy. Villanelles generally are.

This is catchy. Read this out loud. No seriously.

Hear the sledges with the bells -
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

-The Bells, Edgar Allan Poe

I have a slight problem with tintinnabulation (what does that even mean?) but it’s pure magic the way you can hear the clanking and clashing of giant bells tolling in your voice as you read.

3) Moving

There are poems that are like gigantic silver airplanes that catapult you into the sky. And then there are poems that are quieter, like catching the eye of a stranger at a party and chuckling together over the rim of your glass. I like wheeling across the sky. I also like chuckling. What matters here, is that the poem forges a connection. Whether it’s comic, or tragic, or a little of both, you read it, and something clicks. Ah. Yes. That. I know that.

This is not moving (or gorgeous, or catchy):

'Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land,
Taught my beknighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Savior too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their color is a diabolic dye."
Remember Christians; Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

-On Being Brought from Africa to America, Phillis Wheatley

I—don’t get me started. I just want to slap her. I should make allowances. She was kidnapped as a child and had a hard life.

This is the chuckle:

At dawn I rose to escort the Doctors of Art;

In the eastern quarter the sky was still grey.

I said to myself, “you have started far too soon,”

But horses and coaches already thronged the road.

High and low the riders’ torches bobbed;

Muffled or loud, the watchman’s drum beat.

Riders, when I see you prick

To your early levee, pity fills my heart.

When the sun rises and the hot dust flies

And the creatures of earth resume their great strife,

You, with your striving, what shall you each seek?

Profit and fame, for that is all your care.

But I, you courtiers, rise from my bed at noon

And live idly in the city of Ch’ang-an.

Spring is deep and my term of office spent;

Day by day my thoughts go back to the hills.

-Escorting Candidates to the Examination Hall, Bai Juyi (translated by Arthur Waley)

This isn’t overly gorgeous, there are moments of awkwardness like Prick/ to your early levee? That sounds obscene. I blame the translator. But, I laughed when I read it two years ago, and though Bai Juyi died in 846 AD, he’s on my brunch partner wish list.

And this, this, is like flying:

Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth,

'You owe
Me.'

Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole
Sky.

-The Sun Never Says, Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

It is these poems, the moving ones—even if they are as gorgeous as pond scum, or have lines that clang, or even if there is a lot of deadwood and the only moving part is the last line—it is these poems I scrawl onto scraps of paper to keep forever.

Edit: Perhaps I am being unfair, but what makes me angry about poems like Wright and Wheatley's, or well, to be very biased, poems I don't like, is that they leave you going, erm, well, that was clever, but what does it mean? Reading good poetry is an almost religious experience. You don't have to be well educated or smart or poetical by nature to be moved by a good poem. The poem will do all the work. If it doesn't, something's wrong. But clever poetry will merely make you go, erm. I am sick of the tyranny of bad poetry, the way it drowns out good poetry and chases away would-be poetry readers when poetry really is the language of one soul shouting hello to another.

Photo Credit:

Rich Ercolani 

Note: All of Owl's photos are of rabbits because
a) Her camera is broken so she's relying on a stock
b) Her beanie baby, erm, avatar is in a different state