Every Poem is an Island

Well, I leave 2010 with a few brief but beautiful ideas on poetry by Robert Crawford. I hope you enjoy and see you in the new year. 

Every poem is an island. To get to a poem requires sailing out from the mainland of routine language. Some poems are close to shore, others much further away; on every island it is possible to feel remote and at home. A poem is defined by the rugged shore of its right-hand margin, cutting it off from prose…All poems are connected, most simply through the shared cosmopolis of verse.

‘Verse’ means ‘turning’. Some of the ancients likened verse to the movement of oxen as they ploughed a furrow, then wheeled round to plough the next. In this sense every maker of verse is a ploughman poet, breaking open a field of silence. On its little journey, each verse line leads silence into sound, sound into silence. Unlike prose, verse marks a birth and death between every line and the next. Any line, at its centre, its wee acoustic cosmopolis, is moving from margin to margin, sea to sea. It is alert to the back of beyond.

Poetry, so central to human experience, always tends to gravitate beyond the end of the line. The poet winkingly truncates Wittgenstein: ‘About which we cannot speak we must.’

From Cosmopolibackofbeyondism found in Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (W.N. Herbert & Matthew Hollis (ed.), Bloodaxe Books; 2000)

The Problems with the Academia of Poetry

“A poem should not mean

But be.”

‘Ars Poetica’ – Archibald MacLeish

The greatest force against poetry in the last fifty years is academia. This is a bold opinion, but I do believe it true. When we think of the great novels taught, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple, most of us groan and remember the horrors of tedious waffle regarding themes and characterisation. When it comes to poetry, we groan even more. We watch it being hacked and slaughtered from an early age in the classroom, by teachers that have no passion or interest or understanding in poetry.

My first gripe is with the selection; why are all the poems archaic and about coy mistresses and autumn leaves and elegies to people we’ve never heard of? There is no doubt these are amazing poems, but if we are trying to enthuse the youth, these poems are not the way to do it. Why do we not find Ginsberg or William Carlos Williams or Bukowski or Creeley at our ‘introduction to poetry’ lecture?

On top of this, I’m sure most of us agree, the lessons are rarely exciting. Poetry can be magical and although analysis is necessary, academic analysis kills a poem. The true irony is that poetry strives to tell us something in as few a words as possible, whereas analysis of poetry is quite happy to ramble on and on and on…

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” Oh how true and important. I think we need to stress that understanding a poem is not immediately essential; it is far more important to enjoy its aural beauty or imagery or aesthetics. Only then we can go deeper and start understanding it and from there encourage students to explore poetry themselves. Pushing them too hard too quickly will only cause rebellion; the history of poetry book sales has proven that.

Is it not about time we radicalized the way poetry be taught so that future generations will still have poetry in print to appreciate?

this is not a poem

“…poetry is a very dangerous word…I don’t like the stigma that comes with being called a poet…So I call what I’m doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue.” Tom Waits.  

I am currently working on a poetry project which partners up poetry and photography. The intention is simple; to lift poetry and photography out of the quagmire of intellects and into a wider, more mainstream audience. The project attempts to remove the stigma of poetry as ‘hard’ and ‘pretentious’ and to thereby present a unique, singular piece of art (a photo and poem) that has no right or wrong answer. In the 21^st century, poetry needs to be more visual and needs to appeal to as many readers as possible.

Anyway, I was sat with my photographer friend the other day, discussing our objective and throwing around ideas, and she said,

“Maybe poetry needs another name. I mean, most people shudder at the thought, or run the other way the second they hear the word.”

She was right. Poetry does need another name. I have the perfect example. I was reading Carolyn Forche’s The Colonel last week at lunch. It really blew me away. Then, excited, I said to an acquaintance I was with,

“Oh, hey, read this poem, it’s absolutely incredible.”

He replied, as he munched on a wet ham and cheese sandwich,

“Urrr, no thanks, I really don’t get on with poetry, just don’t get it. I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“…Right…Hey,” I replied, “you gotta read this short story then, it’s real short but very powerful.”

“Sure.” He said and took it. It was the same piece of work, Carolyn Forche’s ‘The Colonel’ and I wondered how poetry got such a bad reputation. This then is how I decided on my blog title, this is not a poem. To re-introduce this art form back into society, perhaps we have to convince folks that poetry isn’t a puzzle, it isn’t a trick, sometimes it might not even be a poem. A poem can be so much more; it can be a story, a journal, a snippet of life or flashback, a lyric, a vignette, a psychoanalysis, a fleeting thought, a philosophy, a dream, intimacy, neglect, anger, despair, love…

But whatever it is, poetry is important, too important to neglect. I want people to read poetry, and to take something from it, anything, a single idea or emotion or enjoyment or revelation; just something they found in it, that is what poetry is all about. 

The Beginning

It will quickly become apparent what this is not a poem is, and what it believes. I do not feel it necessary or beneficial to adhere to some manifesto or objective. Like poetry, this is not a poem is an organic creation, whose seed was planted today.

What it does believe in is the beauty, the freedom and joy of poetry. It believes that poetry is a living thing that can easily be suffocated through over-analysis. Similarly, neglect can kill a poem, and neglect is killing 21^st Century poetry. To keep it alive one must read it, talk it, breathe it.

this is not a poem is not an academic study of poetry, on the contrary, it is a place where reading, writing and discussion are the sustenance for poetic longevity. It believes if poetry is to have any place in modern society, we need to keep probing it with questions and not let it shrivel. 

These questions need to be asked. Questions like, ‘what is it doing here?’, ‘why do we need it?’, ‘where is it going?’, ‘what is its purpose now and what was its purpose in the past?’, ‘who reads it?’, ‘why do they read it?’, ‘ ‘do we want it?’, ‘can we do something more with it?’, ‘where does it belong?’

These are just a few ideas this is not a poem will explore as it grows, and reminds us why poetry is so unique.