April is National Poetry Month. Now, if you're like me, poetry bores the fuck out of you. It's pretty much just words strung together in such a way that you know there is meaning to those words...you just don't know what. If you're like me, you're a secret philistine when it comes to poetry: you know you *should* like it, the way you *should* like broccoli, but on a day-to-day basis, you tend to ignore poetry's (and broccoli's) existence.
But, as a lover of words, poetry occasionally gets to me. In college, I took a creative writing class that was half devoted to creative fiction (I was terrible at it) and half devoted to poetry. I surprised myself at how much I enjoyed writing poetry. I wrote one poem about Allen Ginsberg that contained the line, "The cocksucking youths who loitered behind the dumpsters of your work." The professor told me my writing was "sensual and intuitive". You can imagine how a compliment like that would go directly to the head of a 21 year old.
Since college I have rarely written poems, far preferring the kind of writing I'm doing now: critical non-fiction. A sort of academic-lite type writing. And, sadly, I rarely go out of my way to read poetry and seek out new poets. But the love of a perfect turn of phrase is still there, in my heart. A heart like an artichoke, weighed down by many wings*
So in honor of April, here are a few of my favorites, along with just a touch of commentary about why I like them.
***
Tornfallet
by Joseph Brodsky
There is a meadow in Sweden
where I lie smitten,
eyes stained with clouds'
white ins and outs.
And about that meadow
roams my widow
plaiting a clover
wreath for her lover.
I took her in marriage
in a granite parish.
The snow lent her whiteness,
a pine was a witness.
She'd swim in the oval
lake whose opal
mirror, framed by bracken,
felt happy, broken.
And at night the stubborn
sun of her auburn
hair shone from my pillow
at post and pillar.
Now in the distance
I hear her descant.
She sings "Blue Swallow,"
but I can't follow.
The evening shadow
robs the meadow
of width and color.
It's getting colder.
As I lie dying
here, I'm eyeing
stars. Here's Venus;
no one between us.
Joseph Brodsky was a Russian poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 and was named United States Poet Laureate in 1991.
I don't know, there's just something about how this poem is broken up--how he rhymes words with other words that don't rhyme perfectly. I take it to be about a man watching his wife from beyond death and feeling equal amounts of ecstatic beauty and crushing loneliness. "Here's Venus; no one between us"--suggesting the complete freedom that comes with death. You get that much closer to the universe. Yet he still can't stop thinking about his wife's red hair. Beautiful.
***
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
by Robert Herrick
GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying :
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer ;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may go marry :
For having lost but once your prime
You may for ever tarry.
So basically, this poem is like: Go out there, young ladies, and find a man to have sex and babies with! Now, before you're a hag!
But putting aside the fact that Herrick was probably addressing 14 year old girls, this is a beautiful poem that was, of course, featured in that wonderful love letter to poetry and life: Dead Poets Society. Robin Williams' exhortations to his young charges to "Seize the day!", "Suck the marrow out of life!", and "Gather ye rosebuds" is the kind of advice that appeals to the very same 14 year olds Herrick was addressing. When you are young, before you've made the compromises of adult life, it's natural and good to want to run away and read poetry in a cave. Or to imagine that you will BE SOMETHING in life. CHANGE THE WORLD. Not let your heart die when you grow up. Being an adult, with responsibilities and the freedom to do any number of things I was forbidden to do a decade ago, is the best. I wouldn't go back to high school for anything. Yet, this poem, like Dead Poets Society, captures an altruism and an innocence of a time when everything felt like a discovery. The world felt fresh.
***
The Garden of Love
by William Blake
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt not. writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
If William Blake had a hammer, he would be beating you over the head with it: RELIGION DESTROYS LIFE. Religion and faith are great and beautiful, and so much poetry and art (especially older stuff, not Thomas Kincade shit) owes itself to religious belief. But once in a while, it's nice to twist the knife a bit. Blake's problem here, as I see it, is with dogmatic, nature-destroying religion. The kind that "bind[s] with briars, my joys & desires". Religion that says sex is bad, nature is bad, love is bad--the only love worth having is cold piety for the Lord. A medieval view of religion, if you will, versus the more humanistic Renaissance view.
***
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
This is an obvious choice, but oh what a lovely poem. None of the words in this poem are long, 50 cent words, and yet they completely immerse you. "Between the woods and frozen lake"--I see that lake clear as day, don't you? "Easy wind and downy flake"--I can hear that sound when you're out in a rural area and it's snowing and you can actually hear the snow hitting the ground. "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep"--I see those woods, and they aren't scary. The look like something out of the Grimm fairy tales. It's all so simple, yet so effective.Not to mention the line "The darkest evening of the year." If you read that literally, perhaps Frost means December 21st, the shortest day of the year and thus the darkest evening. Also, my birthday. I like the think that the reason I have a secret dark side is because I was born on the darkest day. But my dark side is as lovely and deep as Frost's woods--and there's a light, just on the other side of that frozen lake, that's part of me too.
***
Thanks for listening to my completely un-academic pontification. If you have a favorite poem, please post it below!
*Joseph Robinson wrote that.
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