We Are All Naked Before Poetry

Owl wrote this last April for National Poetry Month. And then decided to put it on the back burner. And then revised it in October but had the irking feeling that poetry was not appropriate for the month of ghosts and candy so she decided to bin the entire thing. Only, well, it's National Poetry Month again and Owl has the strange yen to talk poetry.

(And to post partial nudie pictures of herself. Poetry does that.)

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It’s National Poetry month, the month where people pretend they care about poetry. They dust off the same fifty or sixty shopworn poems by the same thirty or forty poets. Then, come May they trot the poems back up to the attic where they belong. For heaven’s sake, the last time Owl went to a bookstore, she saw that the poetry shelf had been downsized to make room for paranormal romance. 

Owl is cranky. Poetry makes Owl cranky.

Every so often a well-intentioned soul will ask Owl if she writes poetry. Owl will inflate, insulted, and huff, Absolutely not. When pressed, Owl admits she may have written one or two poems but that is entirely not her fault, they were homework assignments.

When people tell her they are poets, she edges away because it might be catching. She both loves and loathes the person who can stand up and say in all seriousness, I am a poet.

Mario Vargas Llosa describes fiction as a reverse strip tease where the writer “goes through the motions of getting dressed, hiding the nudity in which he began under heavy, multicolored articles of clothing conjured up out of his imagination.”

Poetry is just a strip tease. It’s all about the truth, and like strip teases there are two options. Either the audience is completely enchanted and there is no need to say anything more, or the audience is…not enchanted. The less said here the better because everyone’s trying to self-oblivate. The intimacy of poetry makes it vulnerable to such failure.

Owl is not a risk taker. Owl prefers the safer middle ground of fiction, where you can write everything off as an untruth or harmless entertainment. But poetry? Poetry has to be about the truth, raw, naked, glistening. Owl does not have the guts for this.

This is completely at odds with the fact that one of Owl’s all time favorite college professors is a poet. There was a time when Owl read his poem The Sublime before breakfast to give her courage to plough through the day. When the daily rituals of her life seemed ridiculous, getting up, pretending to be a working adult, laughing at jokes she did not understand, she clung to the lines of his poetry. If there was no truth in her life, at least she could borrow truth, borrow it in the way that made her throat go dry, made her eyes wet and made her feel, still, that there was some point to carrying on with the brave day.

But still, to admit to liking his poems, to share them with any stranger on the street, or to casually say to an acquaintance, oh yes, I've been reading poetry—Owl could not do it. It seemed to smack of some internal weakness on her part. Possibly a liver ailment.

“But what was it like growing up and loving poetry?” Owl asked her professor once, because he ran wild in the woods of West Virginia, and if Owl did not have the courage to owe up to needing poetry in a city full of yuppies and intellectuals, she could not imagine how he survived, a poet boy among woodsmen. 

“Oh, sometimes, well, people talked crap and you had to thump them,” he replied.

Owl was maybe too interested in the thumping—thump them how? with sticks? spoons?—because her professor patted her on the shoulder and told her to focus on loving language more, and finding herself, and Owl wanted to explain, no, that's precisely the problem.

It is far easier to be violent, to veer off into the comfortable land of satire and half humor, than to peer at yourself in the mirror, to see how weekly your pulse throbs in your throat, how limply your smile curls across your face, and how behind it all, there is deep seated hunger for everything that is raw and living, blood, tears,  twisted love—in short, everything that is poetry.

This is Owl's pick for National Poetry Month. (Kind of maybe sort of stolen from Patrick at Beyond Easy.)

EMBARRASSING, Czeslaw Milosz

Poetry is an embarrassing affair; it is born too near the functions we call intimate.
Poetry cannot be separated from awareness of our own body. It soars above it, immaterial and at the same time captive, and is a reason for our uneasiness, for it pretends to belong to a separate zone, of spirit.
I was ashamed of my being a poet, as if, undressed, I would display in public my physical defects. I envied people who did not write poems and whom for that reason I ranged among the normal. And in this I was wrong: few of them deserve to be called that.

Not gutsy enough to be fully naked

Great Lions Have Loved to Piss

Home for the holidays and reading like books are Bacardi and I’m out to trash myself into a starry oblivion for Christmas. I’ve got three books going in parallel, I’ll chug one down for hours, come up for air sputtering and then switch to another book for a different flavor, a taste of a different world, one must have variety you understand?  Still, even two books is unsatisfactory, for a shot of inspiration, I must have a third book, and I am reading for balance, for love, for madness, and then, that too becomes too much, and I am sprawled on the floor looking hazily at the ceiling as the faint echoes of words drift through my head—a break before I begin the cycle again.

 1. Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Despite the good amount of time I spend plotting to escape cube-land, there’s a little owlet in me who wears a pant-suit, totes a leather briefcase and dreams of boardroom meetings.

Former consultant and current Stanford MBA professor, Jeffrey Pfeffer, knows the boardrooms backwards and forwards. Power—an examination of power within organizations, what it is, who has it, and how to get it—is the fruit of decades of observation within corporations and MBA classrooms.

Apparently, knowing the boardroom backwards and forwards turns you into Machiavelli. The biggest mistake you can make, Pfeffer says, is to assume the world is fair. It’s not.

But that’s okay, because Pfeffer is here to make the world fair. Intelligence, he says, doesn’t do much except give you an ego. With a bit of practice and a lot of hard work, anyone can acquire power.

And that’s where Pfeffer has me hook line and sinker despite his Machiavellian tendencies. Pfeffer brings it all back to the basics. Do good work. Be nice to people. Stick up for yourself. Be confident. Ultimately, how you make people feel is just as important as performing well.  

Reading Power sets off an adrenaline rush like no other. I started Power the first night I got home and I wanted to jump back on a plane so I could get back to work and test out a dozen game plans for stepping it up at work. That, ladies and gentleman, is inspirational at its best.

Pfeffer infuses his book with an addictive fast pace can-do energy that promises to make any dream attainable. Yet, post-reading Power I’m drained. Pfeffer insists the world is a competitive alpha male environment with clear-cut haves and have-nots and anyone who believes otherwise is fooling themselves. There isn’t room for other perspectives, I am a little nervous because while there is a business owlet in me, there are half a dozen other owlets, wanna be poet owlets, madcap owlets, sleepy owlets who want nothing more than to sit in a warm room watching snowflakes drift in the wind.

Rot! Pfeffer would say. It doesn’t matter whether if you like someone or if you can identify with them, what matters if what you can learn from them.

I suggest reading his book in the same spirit.

2. Death in Venice and Other Stories by Thomas Mann

The first time I heard of Thomas Mann. I assumed he was a philosopher in the style of Nietzsche. I had no idea who Nietzsche was, so I assumed both of them were pompous old men who sat in bars eating fat sausages and puffing on round cigars. I decided I was best off avoiding both of them.

Mann, it turns out is German-Brazilian, prone to crushing on pretty young boys. The joy of reading Mann is that he knows the most wonderful people. In his head, I mean, I don’t know if he knew them in real life. His stories are filled with strange and twisted men and women (well, okay, mostly strange and twisted men) who are beautiful in their twistedness. There is Tobias Mindernickel, sad and haggard, who is chased by children and sups on sorrow, Detlev Spinnell who  is a perfect humbug of a writer, and yet falls to his knees when he hears passion raging on a piano, and awkward and tortured Tonio Kroger who writes because he loves and loves and loves yet again.

Where did Mann meet these people? How did he come up with them? Mann would smile secretly and say this is the privilege of true artists. While Pfeffer says the business world is open to anyone who is willing to put in the time and effort, it is not so with Mann and art. Mann believes all artists are born with sacred mark on their forehead which sets them apart from the rest of the world for life. This is Mann’s artist, and at some level, Mann’s description of himself:

He worked, not like someone working in order to live, but like someone who, because he places no value on himself as a living person, wants only to work, someone who seeks recognition solely as a creative artist and otherwise goes around grey and anonymous, akin to an actor without make-up, who is nothing so long as he has nothing to act out. He worked in silence, isolated, invisible and contemptuous of those insignificant rivals for whom talent is a social ornament, who, whether rich or poor, whether they went about wild and disheveled or in monogrammed-tie luxury, were basically concerned with living happy, loveable, bohemian lives, not seeing that good work only arises under the strain of a miserable life, that he who lives cannot work, and that only after having undergone death can one completely become a creator.

—Tonio Kroger

On most days I suspect I am a charlatan, this wanting to write business is a light fancy that is doomed to plague me every now and then like a case of arthritis that flares up every now and then, but this passage officially confirmed my charlatan status.  

I am fat with happiness, at loath to trade in the easiness of my life for ‘undergoing death to become a creator.’ In fact, I found that whole passage so traumatizing, after copying it out, I stopped writing and played Spider Solitaire for a good half hour.

Traumatizing, I say, but with great envy. Perhaps if I chucked my cellphone out the window, retired to an isolated cave in Northern Alaska equipped with nothing more than a pen and paper…?

No. It will not happen. Once I finish writing I will call a friend, make plans for tomorrow, and I will be very very happy. I will not write, but then, very seldomly am I moved to write.

Perhaps it is this guilt that makes me want to say rather meanly, Mann might have been an even greater artist if he wasn’t so hung up on his own artistry.

3. The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

If Pfeffer is the democratic MBA professor who is hounding you to do a better job, and Mann is the elitist artist who frowns at you for being too bourgeois to appreciate art (unwise Mann! Do not intimidate your audience!) Hafiz is God’s messenger.

Reading Hafiz is like having God reaching out of the sky to hold your hand and smile down at you, saying, it’s alright, darling, I love you.

I write this as a committed atheist who has no conception of God and a severe dislike of religious sentimentalism. The man was a Persian, a Sufi mystic who died in 1390. He should be completely inaccessible.

His poems dance on the page.   

Pay attention. This is Hafiz:

What

Is the

Root of all these

Words?

One thing: love.

But a love so deep and sweet

It needed to express itself

With scents, sounds, colors

That never before

Existed.

Hafiz is funny. Did you know that? You can write love songs to God, they can strike a chord with atheists, and you can do this while being hilarious. That’s what it means to love other people, to see them as a reflection of God.

A royal temple has been built

In a scared forest

On the exact spot

Where for thousands of years

Great lions have loved to piss

God does not like this:

His cherished beasts

No longer have the ability to leave

Their holy scent in the jungle

Near a favorite resting spot of God’s

Left toe.

Daniel Ladinsky wept as he translated Hafiz, and it shows, each line of poetry is infused with intimacy and tenderness. Sometimes Ladinsky gets carried away and adds a few touches of modernity that are jarring:

Let’s turn loose our golden falcons

So that they can meet in the sky

Where our spirits belong—

Necking like two

Hot kids.

Falcons to necking? But Ladinsky must be forgiven because he brought Hafiz out of the grave and across the ocean to us.

Read Hafiz, read him when people have been shouting at you, read him when you have been throwing yourself against the bitter brick walls of expectations and are bruised and battered beyond repair, read him when you want to laugh, when you want to feel that all is right in the world, because all is right in the world, Hafiz will make it so.

Poor Thomas Mann. Poor Jeffrey Pfeffer. They know nothing of joy.

 

Entrepreneur? Artist? Whirling Dervish? Bum? Bum.

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