Andrea Gabor has written recently about the importance of civics education. She has reminded us that the obsession with standardized testing has robbed students of the joy of learning and consumed time that could be better spent in other ways.
The 22-year-old Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, who spoke so beautifully at the inauguration of President Joe Biden, reminded her that we have lost the study of poetry in our mad Race to Leave No Child Behind and to force testing on every student and teacher.
I heartily agree with Gabor. I have always loved poetry. I edited two collections that included many iconic poems: The American Reader and The English Reader (with my son Michael). During a time when I was grieving the loss of a child, I read poetry and found solace in a poem by Ben Jonson. When my children were young, we read poetry together, and they learned the fun of wordplay.
Gabor writes in her article about the need to allot more time to reading and writing poetry.
For too long, poetry has been treated as impractical, and even frivolous, with just 12% of the U.S. adults reporting, in 2018, that they had read a poem during the previous year. Perversely, that sad metric represented a major improvement over the previous decade, when annual poetry reading fell to below 7%. With schools encouraged to focus on practical subjects such as math, science and engineering, and a growing emphasis on nonfiction in the Common Core standards used to help states and school systems decide what to teach, poetry has become an afterthought.
It shouldn’t be. Poetry can be inspirational and teach important lessons about communication (thanks again, Amanda Gorman). It can even be practical, as poetry-loving business executives have long asserted. Elevating the role of poetry also could serve as a low-cost way to bolster student creativity and engagement.
For children, poetry serves as a key to literacy with the rhythm and cadence of books like Dr. Seuss’s “Cat in the Hat” helping even the youngest decode words and meaning, while its absurd rhymes make reading fun. Think of Thing One and Thing Two and the havoc they’ll do.
As children get older, the metaphors and ambiguity of more complex poems serve as an intellectual puzzle, helping youngsters analyze, make connections between words and concepts, and foster critical thinking. Poetry teaches grammar in bite-sized stanzas. Great poems embed unforgettable images and teach the power that a few spare words by Carl Sandburg can convey:
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Gorman herself described the research skills that her inaugural poem employed, including examining the work of earlier poet laureates, as well as the oratory of Fredrick Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln. She drew on the musical “Hamilton,” which pays homage to hip hop and rap, the street poetry that rose out of economic devastation in the 1970s. And she examined tweets following the Capitol riot, which inspired the line, “We’ve seen a force that would shatter this nation rather than share it.”
For Gorman and Biden, who both wrestled with speech impediments, reciting poetry paved the way to eloquence. Gorman has trouble pronouncing Rs, so she practiced the rap lyrics of “Aaron Burr, Sir” from “Hamilton.” To help him overcome a stutter, Biden recited the poems of William Butler Yeats.
For poor children, from New York City to New Delhi, poetry serves as an especially important outlet for self-expression and even for promoting mental health. In Allison Baxter’s class of English-language learners at West Chicago high school, teaching Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” is a key to understanding Lorraine Hansberry’s play, “A Raisin in the Sun.” The poem begins:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
The sophistication of the language and grammar in both the poem and the play provide a welcome challenge for students who relish reciting excerpts from both works, Baxter says. They also offer a window on the Chicago of Hansberry’s youth and an opportunity to help introduce students to their adopted city.
Poetry has its real-world uses, too. Sidney Harman, the founder of the audio-technology company Harman Kardon, once famously said: “Get me poets as managers. Poets are our original systems thinkers.” (Harman endowed a writer-in-residence program at Baruch College; I’m on the program’s selection committee.)
Consider the frustration of Wes Chapman, a health-care technology entrepreneur, who once rejected dozens of applicants for a marketing job at his Hanover, New Hampshire-based startup M2S — English majors from Dartmouth College, his alma mater — because none of them could identify a favorite poem or poet. “Marketing is a job that requires command of language and understanding how words and images influence people,” says Chapman, who notes that the scientists he worked with, at the time, recited poetry. Although Chapman favors 19th-century verse, he eventually hired a young woman who was able to recite a poem by Maya Angelou.
Poetry is an important part of the liberal arts tradition, which is again being seen as a key to business success.
School principals should encourage teachers to make time for verse. And states and districts should help fund the kinds of organizations — including libraries and student clubs — that offer resources and outlets for student poets. And with states advocating for the federal government to suspend standardized testing this year, in recognition of the difficulties posed by the pandemic, schools could be encouraged to produce year-end projects instead, including those focused on poetry.
Inspiration, creativity, joy, critical thinking about language and its nuances: these are the lessons of poetry, and they matter more than bubbling in the right answer. That is, if you care about real education.
And if you don’t care about real education, if you only care about making money, poetry can even be used to market your software.
It was at Dr. Jill Biden’s recommendation that Amanda Gorman was invited to recite her poem. Like the president Ms. Gorman overcame a speech impediment. She wrote part of her poem on January 6th while the Capitol was under attack.
Beautiful!
LeftCoastTeacher . . . dripping with irony, . . . let’s put to verse:
No need to spend on educating;
just spend your care on money making;
but educate with poetry,
as best to help with marketing,
and then of course with software-making.
You’re a poet
And I didn’t even know it
Poetry is wonderful for all the ways mentioned in this post. When I was in junior high school, we had to memorize poems and recite them in our English class. While it was a laborious task, I believe it contributed to being able to speak in public. Strangely enough, I still remember a few of the poems. In high school we read and analyze all of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a task which I recall was like a cerebral gymnasium.
As a teacher of ELLs I also incorporated poems and something called “Jazz Chants” in my beginning and intermediate classes. These tools helped students gain confidence with pronunciation and intonation. Reading poetry serves many purposes that can enable students to better understand the human condition, and it gives students a window to a world outside their own.
great post, retired teacher
on memorizing/ reciting poems: amazingly I can still recall which poems our 5thgr teacher had us memorize/ recite, or at least 2 or 3 of them. Just wondering if maybe the earlier we start that, the better it sticks. (Of course this may just reflect the state of my aging memory 😉
on poetry & jazz chants for ELL’s: yes! I taught Spanish to PreK kids for 20 yrs. Of course, regular PreK teachers wisely set all kinds of instructions to melodies and chants. But somewhere along the line I realized my tykes were capable of much longer and more complex responses if I simply swayed back and forth and emphasized the rhythm which is built right into that language.
I am not fond of rationalizing poetry as good for marketing and business. There are many arts of impression management, among them words matter, but rarely in isolation from graphics, surrounding sounds and so forth. I would love to see students more critical of the degree to which they are influenced by these appeals, designed tobe appealing and bypass reasoning.
Brief personal history of my education in “poetry.”
I had the good fortune of growing up with Caldecott award winning books. My aunt chose these. She taught “children’s literature” in college.
In third grade all students wrote and illustrated a poem. These were bound in books for teachers to use with first and second graders.
In grade seven, we had to select a poem, memorize it, and present it to the class. This was also an occasion for a check on speech impediments and judgments about skills in self presentation.
As a college freshman, I recall being amazed at a small volume titled “How Does a Poem Mean” by John Ciardi (1957).
On a lark today, I looked up Common Core “exemplars” of poetry by grade level. That Google search took me straight to the Poetry Foundation website, and a list of poems by grade level, some familiar.
This website is a resource every teacher should know about. It includes an international roster of poets and a searchable roster of poems.
The Poetry Foundation has also been involved in mentoring young poets. Among them 19-year-old Amanda Gorman. See:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=Amanda+Gorman.
You’re entirely right. I was just being a little sarcastic up there toward the tech moguls using schools to market software and gather data. They don’t care about anything but money.
Our country needs to revive its cultural soul. Many have gone too far down the road to absolutism. Americans are not to be standardized. Art and poetry are the road back to pluralism.
I am afraid that we have an underdeveloped “cultural soul.” We have lost it on-line and watching reality TV.
and clearly the growing ‘fantasy’ TV market has taken over many minds lately
I am not fond of marketing poetry for marketing and business either.
In fact, I think it demonstrates a profound ignorance about the purpose of poetry.
Hint: it ain’t marketing products.
But marketing poetry as useful for business fits right in with the mentality that markets education in general to serve business.
In my opinion, one can not get any more wrong headed about the purpose of education.
Not incidentally ,I’m pretty sure that Amanda Gorman did NOT teach us that “poetry is useful for business”.
The Purpose of Poetry
Poetry is useful
For bidness, this is true
And Robert Frost is fruitful
For selling apples too
Selling Apples too
“He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ — from Mending Wall by Robert Frost
Clearly, Frost wrote that to give Google a false sense of security about their market share for smart phones — to ensure them that Apple’s will never be a threat.
Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” has been used in marketing far too often. The last time I heard it read in marketing was a television ad just a few years ago for the violent shooter video game Call of Duty: Black Ops for PlayStation.
What Robert Frost really meant with his poem
Shopping by Amazon on a Snowy Evening
Whose brands these are, I think I know.
But Jeff is just a middleman though;
He will not see me shopping here
To watch his bank fill up with dough
The local shops must think it queer
To shop without a building near
With shopping cart that’s just a fake
An icon on my iPhone here
They give their Christmas bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sounds the stew
Of Mom and Pop, for goodness sake
The Prime is lovely, bright and new
And I have Christmas shopping to do
And stuff to buy before I’m through
And stuff to buy before I’m through
The image in the third stanza is powerful. This one’s a favorite.
“For too long, poetry has been treated as impractical, and even frivolous”
The “nonsense” poetry of Dr Seuss and Lewis Carroll actually IS impractical and frivolous.
But so what?
Who says it is supposed to be practical and nonfrivolous?
I love impractical and frivolous poems!
I once could recite Dr. Seuss’s “Happy Birthday to You.” Not all of it but enough to make the point.
My favorite Frost (recall that I grew up on a farm):
Something inspires the cow of late
To think no more of a fence than an open gate
Boy was that ever true. I do not miss getting the cows back in.
Good fences make good cows
I am partial to fribulous poems — and also frumious ones.
The fribulouser and/or frumiouser the better.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42916/jabberwocky
I also like any poems that include “SomeDAM I am”
Would you like them on a blog?
Would you like them with a dog?
Yes, I’d like them on a blog
Yes, I’d like them with a dog
I really am a fribulous fan
I really like them
SomeDAM I am
Good capture of Seuss rhythm.
By the way , I’m curious.
Exactly what point were you trying to make by reciting Dr. Seuss?
Was it during your PhD defense, by chance?
Of course, I am really defending my own poems when I defend fribulousness.
But somebody has to do it.
Fribolity
Fribolity’s the spice
Of poetry. It’s nice
Fribolity is cool
For poets it’s a tool
Fribolity is NOT
A reason to get hot
Fribolity’s no jest
It really is the best
Not to be confused with “fibolity”, aka Trumpiness
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this thread.
LCT, here’s something to erase that commercializing of The Road Not Taken from your mind. We did Frostiana by Randall Thompson in my choral group last year, re-attuned my ear to Frost’s voice. Here’s a captioned video by Canto Deo of Denver:
Love that Ciardi book and other works by him as well.
Thanks for that tip! I use the Poetry Foundation website regularly just for my own pursuit/ pleasure, but never realized they had a compilation by grade level.
Another great piece from Ms. Gabor! Bravo, Ms. Gabor, and thank you!
A young woman once wrote to William Wordsworth asking him why he didn’t try his hand at writing one of the new type of literary work then being made popular by German writers–the romance novel. Wordsworth wrote her back saying that while the genre was interesting, he would stick to poetry because of the large audience that it commanded.
Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson–these guys were all among the best-selling authors in their times.
When Randall Jarrell won the National Book Award (I think that was the award) for a book of poetry, he went up to the stage, accepted the check, folded it carefully, put it in a pocket, and said, “If I wrote novels, I wouldn’t have to be so careful about this.”
Once he was asked by an editor to contribute an essay on the topic of “The Obscurity of Modern Poetry.” The editor was doubtless thinking of the difficulty of work by folks like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, etc. Jarrell wrote back saying that he was quite interested in this topic because he had suffered from this obscurity all his life. LOL.
So, what happened? Robert Frost was probably the last poet who made enough money at it that he could do it full-time, for a living. And Frost had a great knack for self-promotion. He and Carl Sandburg were both quite accomplished at this.
In many ways, poetry today is experiencing a renaissance. There are many, many outstanding poets at work right now, and there are lots and lots of little poetry magazines. However, the emphasis, there, must be placed on the word “little.” Major magazines, online or in print, publish almost none of it. The few that do, on occasion, almost exclusively publish pieces by very well-known authors. And–this is the kicker–the big publishing houses almost never publish poets, and when they do, it’s in editions with print runs of a couple thousand copies. Enough for the poet’s mother and some libraries to buy them.
So, what happened? Why did poetry go from being one of the most popular media to one of the least? Well, I have a suggestion about that. Far, far too many English teachers approach poetry in their classes as if it were some sort of guessing game, as though poets were these perverse people who won’t just come out and say what they mean but hide it. They haul off and pepper each lesson with “What does this mean?” And the hidden curriculum, there–what is unintentionally taught–is that poetry is just too difficult for most people to read–a medium in which meaning is hidden and has to be ferreted out as in an archaeological dig. And, of course, The Common [sic] Core [sic], with its “New Criticism for Dummies” or “New Criticism Lite” approach just compounds the problem. So, we end up with this weird situation in which almost everyone has written poems and has them stuffed away in a drawer, but almost no one reads them, buys works by new poets, and so on.
Years ago, I taught under a very great poet named James Worley. I know. You’ve never heard of him. But his work was breathtaking. He had gotten a PhD at Columbia under Lionel Trilling. He could prop his feet by the fire and read ancient Greek in the original without a dictionary. And his poetry was brilliant. And he was almost completely unread.
He taught me a trick for undoing the trepidation that students have when they see a poem, taught to them by generations of confused English teachers (“Oh my God! A poem! Hidden meanings! No way I’ll understand this!”) He would write out the poem as a prose passage and have his students read it. Their comprehension shot way, way, way up because they weren’t approaching the text from a place of foregone expectation of failure.
Of course, there are places where poetry is very much alive: in poetry readings and poetry slams, in rap music. More of these! And some changes in how we approach poetry instruction in classrooms. Here’s a hint about that:
Wherever we go in the world, when we go back to their earliest surviving works that are not, say, just lists of leaders and records of the amount of grain in a granary, are poetry. Poetry was there at the dawn, but not static, on a page, but alive, in recitation and chanting around campfires and at communal meals. Poetry was spoken art. It was reenactment. It was performance.
Think of that time before electric lights. When night fell, it fell hard. And people gathered around campfires. And they told stories. And in this heightened setting of the campfire, the stars, often with accompaniment with drums and rhythmic movement, the language took on heightened form–rhythm, meter, alliteration, and so on. The oldest orature is all poetry.
Want to revitalize poetry? CREATE MORE COFFEEHOUSE POETRY READINGS. Or organize, as I did at my last school, poetry slams, where the kids read their work. Make it what it is–a PERFORMANCE ART.
I will skip, here, the issue of the turn toward obscurity in poetry that occurred with the magnificent poetry of T.S. Eliot so widely and poorly copied. I will skip, also, the great confessional poetry of the late twentieth century by people like Plath and Sexton and Levertov that led people to think that any spewing of their inchoate feelings onto a page, if broken up into lines and fragments, was a poem. In both cases, brilliant models led to a lot of work that was unreadable, that gave poetry a bad name–another reason why published poetry is so little read now–why poets have to find a day job teaching in a university somewhere and be subsidized/underwitten by their university presses.
The greatest living poet that I know is named Brooke Baker Belk. No one has, at yet, published a volume of her work. A few pieces have appeared, here and there, in small anthologies. If she were to send a piece to one of the big-circulation magazines that still publish poetry on occasion–The New Yorker, for example–it would be lost among the thousands and thousands of submissions (many unreadable and unread by the interns or whoever sends out the rejection notices). But I’m pretty sure that when her first volume does appear, one day, that it will be as important an event in the history of poetry and letters as was the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads or Frost’s North of Boston.
Poetry is difficult to define. But any definition has to be qualitative, for whatever it is, poetry is language at its very best. When you say the thing perfectly, well, that’s poetry.
The same thing happened with jazz. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was THE most popular musical form in the United States (and in much else of the world). But then along came be-bop and free jazz, and while these were WONDERFUL to aficionados, they left audiences behind.
Same thing with classical music–the turn toward atonalism and other sophisticated experimentation in classical composition left popular audiences behind.
So, one school of contemporary poetry modeled itself after Eliot and Pound–it was obscure in the sense of difficult, eruditely allusive and fragmented. A lot of people learned from those masters, alas, the wrong lesson–that the way to make poetry was to be obscure. The result, a lot of bad poetry that had not their mastery.
Another school modeled itself after the confessional poetry of Plath and Sexton and Levertov. Personal events. A dump of internal conflict and emotion. But again, we got a lot of bad poetry produced by people who had not their mastery. No, breaking it up into lines doesn’t make it a poem. Brilliance of observation and expression and form and perfectly captured, evocative speech does.
So, it’s not just the meaning hunt that killed poetry. A lot of great work got buried under a lot MORE unreadable junk.
I am fascinated by the comparison you make between poetry and Jazz. When I was younger, I longed to play jazz, which I loved to hear. But I never could play anything until I found music that I could approach. Then I learned to play.
In so many ways, poetry (and jazz and music) illustrates that we have become a culture of watchers. We watch people perform the national anthem. We watch popular musicians with amazing talent bend their voices in ways none of the rest of us can ever hope to duplicate. And we watch politics, and wonder why it takes us along instead of our driving the herd where we want it to graze.
Some years ago, as rap became a phenomenon, everyone was horrified at the rough lyrics. My old professor, Charles Wolfe, suggested that rap was just the people taking their language back from the academics.
Taking their language back. Well, one issue with that formulation: black people in the US always had it. White people just didn’t hear it.
Roy, one of my best guitar teachers, Jon Damian, who was an instructor at the Berklee School in Boston for 35 years, taught me something very interesting. First, he had me learn a TON of chords in the first position. Then, he had me, for each chord, move the note up until I encountered another note in that chord and write those all out. By that means, I created my own library of all these chords in all these inversions, all the way up the neck. This took two or three weeks. However, by the end of that time, I could write a chord melody version of ANY tune in a matter of a few minutes, putting the melody at the top, in the middle, or in the base. Add to that some scales on those chords, and one is cooking. I had been playing, and in bands, too, for some 20 years or so before he taught me that. But it totally liberated my guitar playing and composing and improvising–took it to an entirely different level.
One of my guitar teachers
I was fascinated, Roy, when I learned that Bach had a terrible time finding anyone with skills enough to play his stuff. We have so many great schools now, so many great teachers. No doubt, there are more world-class guitarists alive today than at any other time in history. But yeah, I still wish that more would play. BTW, this:
Great clip! Thanks
So, Roy, start with three tonics, or roots, F, G, and C, in the first position (that is, made on the first four frets), and make charts for a bunch of chords with that tonic in the first position (first position is on the first four frets, 2nd on the next four frets, etc). So, for F, you might make charts in the first position for: Fmaj, Fmaj7, Fsus4, F9, F6, F6/9, Fmaj13, Fm, FM9, FM6, Fm6/9, FM7, Fm7b5, Fm(maj7), FM9, F7, Faug, Fdim, and Fdim7
Then write out the notes for each chord. An Fmaj7 has these notes: F (the root), A (the third), C (the fifth), and E (the seventh). Make a chart for the chord in the first position, where the x’s are muted or unplayed strings, and the numbers represent the fret. Better yet, draw a chord box for the chord.
Fmaj7
1 x 2 2 1 x (root, 7th, 3rd, 5th)
Then, for each note in that chord, move up the neck on that string until you reach a different note in the chord. So, if you move up from the first fret on the lowest string (the F played on fret 1), the next note in the chord that you will encounter is the A on fret 5. Do this for each string of the chord, and you will end up with an inversion of the chord in a new position:
Fmaj7
5 x 3 5 5 x (3rd, root, 5th, 7th)
Continue in this manner up the neck. You will end up with charts of inversions of your chords all the way up the neck. With that in hand, you can create a chord melody arrangement with the melody at the top simply by, for each chord in the tune, choosing the inversion of the chord that makes it easiest to grab that top note.
RE: jazz or rather blues. In this year’s session I showed them Jericho Brown’s poem “The Tradition,” then broke it into stanzas to show them it was a sonnet, & we talked about why he didn’t break those stanzas apart. Then showed them 12-bar blues, & descriptions by pundits of “blues poetry,” than lyrics of familiar ‘50’s-‘60’s blues songs, then super-old lyrics of blues songs derived from slave work-chants. We saw the connection between blues and sonnets.
ps. Bob, I’m getting an education in the evolution of jazz via my sax-playing husband, who recently indulged in a few box sets of his faves. This week we walked through Wayne Shorter, ’50’s-2000’s, culminating in a youtube video of a recent concert that almost put me to sleep with its endless intuitive variations… I guess jazz-wise my head is still in the ’60’s 😉
Ginny, I highly recommend the Ken Burns Jazz series. A wonderful overview of this rich history.
Americans to add to that list of best-selling authors: Longfellow, James Whitcomb Riley (“Little Orphant Annie”), Robert Frost. BTW, Riley and Frost, like Poe before them, made a lot of their money on the lecture/readings circuits. Again, poetry as performance.
Bob In a word, Homer. And I enjoyed your note.
But also, though we can point to many causes for its demise, poetry was beaten out of schools in good part by scientific positivism (which underpins the penchant for testing, still). What is important about poetry doesn’t do tests well.
Nor should they, or at least if we do include them in testing, . . . in a completely different manner than we are accustomed to.
Also, earlier in a different thread, “we” had a discussion about dogmatism and the way we make judgments.
For this discussion about poetry: if judgments are what we END our questions with, as well as our collections of meaningful insights, then poetry is more about raising questions, having insights, and collecting further meaning BEFORE we make judgments . . . than about making judgments and getting on with filling in the bubbles in my life.
In my experience teaching, and with an understanding of how the attitude of dogmatism works at hand, I have found often that poetry and other more complex literature, whether it be scientific or literary prose, is bothersome to dogmatists. . . . precisely because these kinds of writings tend to break through the empty beliefs and dogmatic barriers that closed minds have set up for themselves.
Initially, at least, for the dogmatist, thinking and reflection is quite painful. It’s only when the dogmatic scales begin to fall from our eyes, and we begin to love our own questions and insights, do we begin to find joy in it. And it’s teachers in the classroom who can recognize those moments in our students . . . in the moment. CBK
precisely because these kinds of writings tend to break through the empty beliefs and dogmatic barriers that closed minds have set up for themselves
Indeed
But I am talking pre-Homer even, though the Homeric hymns are more in the ballpark–the “Hymn to Demeter,” etc.
Bob I meant to be inclusive with mentioning Homer. Even in translation . . . CBK
Of course! I so appreciate, CBK, your comments. This is a deep insight you have about literature vs. dogmatic writing. Literary works, though imaginative, are grounded in the concrete, and so generalization from them is typically checked by that. And often, ofc, people write these concrete representations precisely in order to challenge dogmatisms. I think, for example, of the lie to which Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath put the Social Darwinist Capitalist apologetics of his time or of what works such as these demonstrate, so clearly, so poignantly, about the arguments people make for going to war: Ambrose Bierce‘s “Chickamauga,” Thomas Hardy’s “Channel Firing” or “The Man He Killed,” Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.”
Bob One of the most poignant arguments for and against going to war is in “The Melian Dialogues” written by Thucydides. Some texts just stay with you . . . that one did for me. It’s basically a might-makes-right . . . no it doesn’t kind of argument. CBK
Somehow, Catherine, I’ve never gotten around to reading Thucydides, though I know of him, of course. I must do this. I am a huge fan of Herodotus–some very strange and interesting stuff there!
Herodotus tells this story: During the reign of Tiberius, a certain Thamus, sailing for Italy by way of the island of Paxi, heard, as he approached the island, a wailing from across the salt water. As he drew near, a voice called out to him, saying, “Thamus, when you arrive at Palodes, tell the people there the grievous news: The Great God Pan is dead.”
I can tell you, though, that this story is most certainly a fabrication, for I ran into Pan a couple years ago at Burning Man, and though he looked somewhat the worse for wear, like many another aging hippie, he moved with a quick, animal power, so that it took some doing for me to keep up with him as we talked. I can still see him clearly, in my mind’s eye, dreadlocked, shirtless, skin like armadillo hide, eyes set deep into a storied face, a necklace of simple white shells falling over his chest, and besides that necklace, but a pair of Indian white linen pants and tiny horns (post molt) protruding on either side of his high, broad forehead.
He said, “Yes, one would think I was dead. My former domain and dominion of woodlands is reduced, now, to 2 percent of its former reach. Two percent! Your species has no respect for its elders, those ancient trees that were building communities when your kind was barely standing upright on the savannah. Fish float belly up in once clear running streams. Red tides and jellyfish bloom along the margins of the seas. And the very mountaintops, blasted away, look like the ruins of old Stonehenge or of the Cathar castle of Puilurens. Ah, the Cathars. I loved the Cathars.
“But let me let you in on a secret. Every mother invests in all her children, but it is impossible for her not to favor some in some ways and others in others, and I think that the Mother always loved you (and the field mice—they are so gentle) best. Something about your quick intelligence, your alertness, the fire in your bellies, your yearning, quickened her in an almost incestuous bond. And she has shown this, hasn’t she, in her bounty toward you?
Now, you have made a mess of things, surely, but though you have, as teenagers do, forgotten us—the old gods—we have not forgotten you. We still have faith though you have none. We know that the dark blood of the mother flows in your veins, that you are body of her body, mind of her mind. You will grow beyond this disastrous, heedless, awkward phase and into a profound adulthood tending, as all things do, toward divinity. This has happened many times, on many worlds of which you know nothing. Fortunately for us all, the Mother is stronger, more resilient than you can possibly imagine.
She is furious, of course. She will discipline you before this is through. But her love is as long, long-lasting as is the passing cloud before the moon or a wave of the sea, turning, returning, world without end (as it seems to those with your sort of vantage).
In you, as elsewhere, something profoundly beautiful is to be born. This is a phase transition. Surely you can feel it, like a pot of water on the stove just before it starts boiling. Don’t be so glum. Dance.”
And then he was gone. I glimpsed him again, though, later that night, out on the playa, playing his flute and dancing the rasa lila with a bunch of hippie gopis.
–From Notes to Krystalina, Bob Shepherd, 2018
Bob . . . and he wasn’t even Jewish. But whatever you were smoking at the time, I want some of that. CBK
LOL, CBK. When in Rome.
Bob, I have spent a fair amount of time teaching appreciation of modern poetry to kinda-interested but skeptical adults (as noted in below post re: my bookclub). We would skate back and forth between 19th/early-20thC works and mid-20thC poets, learning about forms, rhythm and rhyme from the earlier ones, focusing on classic contrasts like Whitman vs Dickinson to get a foreshadowing of what was to come, in terms of free-flowing, wild-assed stuff vs super-compressed tricky puzzles. And beefing up appreciation of the later poetry with lessons on all the ways Eng-lang poets have learned to rhyme a mostly un-rhyming language, eventually working it to their advantage by using true rhyme to contrast w/slant, short vowels to contrast w/long, all in service of the content/ message. It has been a good background for approaching the most recent 50 yrs of poetry, which hasn’t strayed far from 2nd-half 20thC poetry, still digesting & working with challenges set forth long ago. Obviously we read it all aloud, & really have to, to hear the rhythm & get how it underpins, provides foundation, punctuates.
This is awesome, Ginny! Yes, a very different case, in Germanic languages than in the Romance ones, in which rhyme comes so easily!
I am surprised to hear nothing yet in this sub-thread about art. To me, poetry is as connected to art as it is to music. It’s painting with words, using them to create a visual compilation in the mind—often abstract (in modern poetry)– sometimes even on the page. It reminds me of how one of my musician sons (the one who periodically creates beats for hip-hop DJ’s) would select ‘patches’ of recorded music and ‘paint’ them like notes into compositions. In my poetry sessions with the book club, I had early success breaking through to their resistance to poetry with that concept, as most of them had a more sophisticated grasp of visual art than they did of music.
I’m a big fan of the “Newsreels” in Dos Passos, which consisted entirely of such sampling.
I, too, had to choose a poem and illustrate it in junior high…chose Robert Frost’s The Oven Bird. In high school, we read John Milton including his sonnets, Camus, and Paradise Lost. Tough going sometimes, but I recall many of the sonnets and was grateful for Paradise Lost when I got to college and had to read Paradise Regained. Had the chance, too, to see and hear Robert Frost at Boston College recite from his most recent volume, In The Clearing. He included the poem he recited at Kennedy’s inauguration. Frost died the following year which made my trip to BC all the more special.
Oh, Susan! How fortune! And The Oven Bird! What a great poem! I rediscovered Milton late in my college career. Wow! Fascinating. Powerful work! We definitely shouldn’t read him too young. However, exposure to recitation of this work! Great.
cx: How fortunate! Aie yie yie. Oh for an editor of WordPress posts!
Bob- I had a fabulous English teacher in high school. He not only got me through Milton, but Shakespeare, G.B. Shaw and many others. The best part was that we had to write 500 words a week as juniors and 600 words a week as seniors on a topic he put on the board Monday am. He taught me to be a better writer and a lover of reading. I thank him frequently for the lessons he taught (he is no longer with us these days, but I thank him nevertheless).
I too had such teachers. Mr. Schimezzi. Mr. Long. Donald Gray. So grateful to them, every day of my life.
Among many for me, Mr Schroeder, my 12th-gr Eng teacher stands out. It was ’65-’66, and someone put him onto Bob Dylan. Amidst a demanding year where I remember reading Middlemarch and writing a term paper on Anglo-Saxon language, he managed to shoehorn in a study of Dylan’s 115th Dream, Subterranean Homesick Blues et al, as poetry.
Susan: Thanks for the reference to the Ovenbird. Takes me back to the clearing in the Appalachian Forest in Southwestern Virginia where the tiny, vocal character entertained my wife and I one afternoon. Funny how Frost took the Ovenbird at his word to ask a question:
“The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.”
Diminished indeed. The population of neotropical migrants like the ovenbird has declined precipitously since Frost wrote those words.
Bravo! Poetry should have a place
at every table.
Yes!
Metaphors be with you!
Use the phors, Luke, and the OptOut. “Use the OptOut, Luke,” and metaphors be with you.
LOL!!!
And an evil Lord arose in the West, and rivers of green ran out from his Dark Tower, snaking across the land. The smell of its noxious vapor intoxicated many, and they grew mad with a lust for the power that the green conferred. The voice of the evil Lord rose from the waters and enveloped these, whispering in their ears, “I will make you potentates and princes and pundits and commissioners and Secretaries of Education and give you seats at the Oligarchs’ Feast. But deliver the children unto me!” And so they did, and the children were turned into data, and all was laid waste and joyless.
Episode Two: The Resistance Arises
One Poem to rule them all
One Poem to find them
One Poem to bring them all
And in the Lightness bind them
In the Land of the Free, where the politicians lie
LOL.
And with the Lightness blind them
Like enthusiastically, fervently, sincerely.
Now I will share a little something. I have been running an annual “poetry session” for my bookclub for 15+ yrs. The group was founded as an expat offshoot of a local Newcomers’ organization. I was invited in 25 yrs ago by a French neighbor. Back then, 3/4 of them were bilingual & raised elsewhere. The foreigners had another common thread: drawn to NJ by Bell Labs & Big Pharma, they were scientists; even the Americans were mostly STEM or financial types. (Luckily there’s one w/Eng Lit degree who helps me out w/poetry selection.)
Our book selections lean heavily to immigrant tales, w/ a sprinkling of Eng/Amer classic lit, as they’re motivated to fill in ed gaps. They had little background in Eng/Amer poetry (or any poetry), found esp modern poetry off-putting, but wanted to learn. Happens to be one of my avocations; studied Fr & Sp poetry in college, plus Eng/ Amer poetry at the New School.
Over the yrs they’ve become interested & discerning poetry readers. Last Jan I did a session just for them on the challenges of translating poetry into Eng from Sp, Fr, German, Italian. This Jan we compared rhythm & rhyme in the great [2008-2010 poet laureate] Kay Ryan vs amazing newcomer Jericho Brown— plus a look at Nobel prizewinner Louise Glück, connecting her Persephone-themed work with a recent discussion on Madeline Miller’s “Circe” novel. I felt that rewarding teacher-thing this year when for the first time ever one of them suggested a feature poet for next year [Audre Lorde].
Thank you Diane for posting and thank you all for this wonderful thread. I’d just like to add that Dr. Seuss’s books may seem frivolous, but are anything but. Can there be a more powerful message to protect the environment than the Lorax? And how about Horton’s message of care, respect & protection: “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”
I might add that our capitalist world would be a far better place if more of its business people were poetry lovers like Harman & Chapman…
You’re right about many Dr Seuss books being non fribulous, but,off course, he also wrote many fribulous poems like Green Eggs and Ham.
And for what it’s worth, Dr . Seuss is my favorite poet.