6.POETRY AFFIRMS AND CELEBRATES MORE THAN IT DENOUNCES OR CRITICIZES.

When we read poetry, we are often made aware of those positive qualities of human existence that everyone appreciates, such as happiness and joy, beauty, generosity, love, hope, gratitude, and forgiveness. Not that poetry doesn’t address such things as grief, tragedy, crisis, and loss. It does, of course, since all these are also part of being human. Often, however, when a poem does call up negative emotions and experiences, it can still be affirmative. The first two stanzas of “This Being Human is a Guest House,” by the ancient Persian poet Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks), are an example of what I mean:

This being human is a guest house
Every morning new arrival
A joy, a depression, a meanness
Comes as an unexpected visitor

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows
Who violently sweep your house
Empty of its furniture
Still treat each guest honorably
He may be cleaning you out
For some new delight! 

Rumi ends his poem by saying that we should “Be grateful for whoever

comes/Because each has been sent/As a guide from the beyond.”

I like to think that Rumi has some wise advice for us in his poem.

My main point in this article is that the most memorable poems, and lines from poems, are ones that tend to affirm life, to say yes to life.

It shouldn’t be surprising that when big national disasters take place, poetry flourishes. We saw this just after 9-11, and after the death of Diana, who had been married to Prince Philip. Thousands of poems were written, collections of 9-11 poems appeared, and in the case of Diana’s death, thousands of flowers with notes and poems attached to them were placed on the huge lawn outside Diana’s home. Trouble and catastrophe tend to cause people to respond with words that can be helpful, both to those who suffer and to those who wrote the words. When we are in the presence of suffering, we often feel the power of our connection with others.    

Consider the following lines, which I have for this article deliberately recalled from memory without looking them up in books. What I’ve found with this enumeration of lines is that my memory has a very strong bias toward positive, affirmative lines rather than ones with negative connotations or denotations. I’m personally glad this is so, since it seems to be evidence that I’m more optimistic than I sometimes assume! You might want to try this yourself and see what happens. Just let favorite lines from poems (and even songs) occur to you, and write them down. I would guess, based on my example, that they too would be mostly positive and upbeat. And if my little experiment is valid, doesn’t that say something about the usefulness—even the necessity—of poetry? I think it does. I also think that many of the readers of my blog will already know by heart some of the lines I quote here (Note: some of the line breaks may not have been accurately remembered):    

Put your arms around me like a ring around the sun.

Give me the splendid, silent sun . . .

Oh beautiful for spacious skies . . . (song)

When to the sessions of sweet, silent thought,                                       

I summon up remembrance of things past . . .

I believe a leaf of grass is no less                                                        

than the journey work of the stars . . .

I celebrate myself and sing myself,                                                     

and what I shall assume you shall assume,                                                       

for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Ah, love, let us be true to one another . . .

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,                                          

and a small cabin build there . . .

You are so beautiful . . . to me (song). . .

But thy eternal summer shall not fade . . .

That’s the way (that’s the way)                                                              

I like it (I like it) . . . (song)

Fair and fair and twice so fair,                                                               

And fair is any may be,  

The fairest shepherd on the green,                                                          

A love for any lady.

I shake my white locks at the runaway sun . . .

Springtime is my time, is your time, is our time,                                     

for springtime is love time, and viva sweet love.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

I love you all day. It is that simple.

Jenny kissed me when we met,                                                    

jumping from the chair she sat in . . .

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways . . .

Earth has not anything to show more fair . . .

We die, and rise the same, and prove                                              

Mysterious by this love . . .

And death shall have no dominion . . .

Your eyelashes are a narcotic.

How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead?

And the Sabbath rang slowly in the pebbles of the holy stream . . .

The mind is an enchanting thing,                                                          

is an enchanted thing . . .

I measure time by how a body sways.

Be with me, early and late.                                                                    

I will study wry music for your sake.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,                                           

you make me happy when skies are grey.  (song)

The bird is on the wing.                                                                           

Drink to the bird.

And therefore, while youthful hue                                                            

sits on thy skin like morning dew . . .

There will be an answer,                                                                       

let it be . . . (Beatles’ song)

An aged man is but a paltry thing,                                                               

unless soul clap its hands and sing,                                                        

and sing for every tatter is his mortal dress . . .

Drink to me only with thine eyes.

               

Smile, though your heart is aching,                                                 

smile, even though it’s breaking (song)

Here are a few more ending lines of poems from memory (there are some above too):

Look for me under your boot soles.                                                       

I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

Lord let me die, but not die                                                                    

Out.

I must lie down where all the ladders start,                                          

In the foul, rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

I move at the heart of the world.

As you from crimes would pardon’d be,                                               

let your indulgence set me free.

The wives, the beautiful wives,                                                            

are with their men.

And miles to go before I sleep,                                                              

and miles to go before I sleep.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on,                                         

and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Never again would birdsong be the same,                                          

and to do that to birds is why she came.

Affirmation. Optimism. Gratitude. Hope. Love. Courage. Kindness. All these feelings and thoughts make us feel worthwhile as persons whenever we experience them in our everyday lives—as well as in poems. Nothing makes me feel better as a poet than to have someone say that they appreciated a poem I wrote, or that the poem affected them in a good way. I’m sure this is true of any poet. 

Robert Frost once called a poetry “a momentary stay against confusion.” I agree, but I also believe that within that “momentary stay,” poetry has the power to show us how to live. Think of those poems and lines of poems that you have carried in your mind for years, perhaps decades. How have they influenced your life? Have they been useful to you? Have they been, in fact, downright indispensible at times? Would your life be the same now without them?     

5.

POETRY TENDS TO BE PLAIN-SPOKEN AND PESONAL
          “Uncle, for God’s sake, speak comfortable words.”
                                 --from Shakespeare’s RICHARD II
Regarding diction (which means word choice), there are basically two kinds of words: public (ones we use in the marketplace or workplace, and in formal situations) and personal, “comfortable” words (ones spoken among friends, in the home, etc.) Stuart Chase once said: “The long word may be the best word to use, but not because it’s long.” Poets tend to prefer personal, close words, such as “house” instead of “residence.”
Of course, as I’ve said before, there will always be exceptions. Emily Dickinson uses a long word exquisitely well at the beginning of a poem:

Exaltation is the going                                                                                 

of an inland soul to sea . . .

The word “incarnadine” comes up in MACBETH, referring to blood-stained hands. Robinson Jeffers, in a poem about looking forward to being consumed by buzzards after his death, says: “What an enskyment!” (I think he made up that word, which also happens in poetry, though not often.)
One of my favorite long words, which is a noun used an adjective, can be found in “To His Coy Mistress,” written centuries ago, by Andrew Marvell: 

My vegetable love should grow                                               

Vaster than empires, and more slow. . .

I’m sure Marvell savored that phrase, “vegetable love.” But even though there are always exceptions to any “rule,” poets generally prefer the common, shorter, everyday words of personal conversation. “What are days?”asks Philip Larkin in his poem, “Days.” And he answers himself: “Days are to be happy in . . . Where can we live but days?” This is clear, straight-forward, accessible language. What’s true of everyday conversation is also true of poetry: it’s harder to be straight-forward and clear and concise than it is to be long-winded, complicated, and obscure.  

Maybe you’ve noticed that quite often when you hear someone excited speak, it’s as if they’re relying on something spontaneous and sincere—not something that’s overly “thought out” and deliberate. I had a very wise karate sensei who once told my class that, when you have something to say to someone, and look them in the eye and say it clearly and plainly, they can’t turn away from you—they have to listen. That was a karate lesson that worked for me, from then on, outside the dojo in everyday life.  

You’ve heard it said that “there’s no such thing as a concise lie.” “What you hear coming out of a man’s horn, that’s what he is,” said the great jazz man, Louie Armstrong. The same can be said of how we use words. You know a lot about someone by the way they speak, and by the words they use—let alone what they say. In fact, when a person is being honest and forthright, it’s hard to separate the content from the style.

There’s a poem by James Wright in which the speaker is looking down into a river, where a woman he’s had affection for has jumped from a bridge to her death. Here are the last lines 

Come up, love, out of the river,                                                                               

or I will come down to you.

I believe that one reason some people turn away from poetry is that it can make them uncomfortable with its directness and powerfully expressed emotions. We all have these recycled emotions and ideas and thoughts going through our minds all the time, and poetry can sharpen them and expose them with lines like the ones above, by James Wright.

Or consider these lines in a poem called “A Blessing,” also by James Wright, about watching two Indian ponies standing close together in a field. The speaker and a friend approach them, stand close to them, and observe the horses, noticing that

They bow shyly as wet swans.

They love each other.                                           

There is no loneliness like theirs. 

I’ve always been a little puzzled by those last two lines. And yet there’s     something right about what Wright says here: love and loneliness sometimes do go together. You may think they shouldn’t go together, and yet they can and do. Some of us just don’t care to think that it’s possible. And that’s alright too. Poetry, like Nascar racing or chess, is not for everyone.                       
                                                 *     *     *
Poets like to speak in the dialect they grew up with, if only because they find those words and inflections comfortable. Consider Gwendolyn Brooks’ well-known poem, “We Real Cool,” which begins: “We real cool/ we left school.” She grew up on the South Side of Chicago where  young men might very well say something like “We Reeeaaaal Cool,” which is how Ms. Brooks read the line when I attended her reading in Minnesota many years ago. It sounded authentic to me, and made me realize that I’d been reading it aloud to classes without the authentic inflections for decades. The poem is ironic, of course. The young men who hung out at the pool hall lived reckless lives and died way too young. They were anything but “cool.”  
Consider the ending line of Carl Sandburg’s poem, about a passenger train and its passengers: 

           I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers: Omaha.’

That Midwestern diction, and tone of voice, along with the triple-rhythm-pacing of the line with its many syllables, has always reminded me of a train clicking down the tracks. This line—in fact Sandburg’s poetry in general—has been pretty much my standard as a poet for all of my career, or ever since I found the train poem and a few others by Sandburg in a book (which I still have) on my dad’s book shelves in the hallway of our house in Sioux City, Iowa. The poem, called LIMITED, especially its ending line, had a genuine quality to me, and it was ironic that, at the time I discovered the poem (about 1954, at the age of 14), I was living on a railroad bluff, so I just happened to have been very familiar with passenger trains. 
Also, I’d never in my life seen the word Omaha in a poem. This was something altogether new to my young mind—a revelation. How could it be? I was thinking to myself. How could a poet use a word like that—naming something so local, so close by, in fact only 90 miles down the highway from Sioux City: another packinghouse town like ours! Seeing the word amounted to a giant leap in my life as a language person (though at the time I didn’t consider myself a language person at all, but pretty much a jock). It was a sledge-hammer word: Omaha. And it would help me realize, over time and especially in my apprenticeship years as a poet, that poetry can come right out of one’s own personal experience, out of one’s own backyard, or, just over the railroad bluff—there it is, a poem: Look! And other things as well: the roundhouse, the oil cars, the steam engines and their hissing steam—all of it. I could write about what I was familiar with: Trains, yes, and pole vaulting, running with a football, high school buddies, my girlfriend—the Missouri flood of 1952, walking through sewers with a flashlight, anything, all of it . . . .
Another example I found by Sandburg in those same moments that day—I still recall, vividly, standing there with that thick, dark blue anthology in my hand, THE OXFORD BOOK OF AMERICAN POETRY, which my dad probably found at the Salvation Army store under the viaduct—was from Sandburg’s poem, “Fish Crier.” 

I know a fish crier down on Maxwell Street who has a voice                       

like the north wind blowing over corn stubble in January.

Those lines were believable to me as well, since, up to the age of eight I  lived on an acreage that was bordered by cornfields. I had heard the sound of the wind “blowing over corn stubble in January.” It was an enchanting sound already fixed in my memory. In recent years, I stole the phrasing and imagery from Sandburg in a short landscape poem. 

Even poems written hundreds of years ago can sound believable as speech. The following lines have been around for a long time: 

Come live with me and be my love,                                                      

and we will all the pleasures prove . . .

And of course Shakepeare’s sonnet that begins

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

How about Nursery rimes, for instance: “Hinx, minx, the old witch winks,/the fat begins to fry,/there’s nobody home but Jumping Joan,/and father and mother and I.” ? I think that poem is about 500 years old, and its diction is still fresh.  

These opening lines of a poem by a recent American poet also have a truthful tone and rhythm and diction, at least for me:  

The last time I saw Donald Armstrong                                                  

he was staggering off oddly into the sun,                                              

going down, of the Philippine Islands.      

                      

I’ve spoken in this column and elsewhere about poets imitating and/or stealing from other poets. Many years after reading the poem I just quoted from, I wrote a poem about watching a baseball game in Kansas City. The poem begins: 

                  The best thing in my head of baseball                                                             

                  and Kansas City is the Royals playing the Red Sox . . .

My opening line has the exact rhythm of the other poet’s opening line, one that I think creates a lot of initial momentum and drama. You see, I had that line and its rhythm in my head and it just came out at the beginning of my poem. I don’t think it was a conscious thing—it was just there in my memory—a line by one of my favorite poets, and one who, like Sandburg, has had a powerful influence on my own development as a poet: James Dickey. 

Take a look at any poem you’ve liked for many years. Read it aloud, and ask yourself: does this sound like someone talking? Does it sound like real speech, what some have called “heightened speech?” (A good definition of poetry, I think.)

Consider the opening lines of a poem by Janet Lewis called “Girl Help”:

Mild and slow and young                                                                          

she moves about the room,                                                                        

and stirs the summer dust                                                                           

with her wide broom . . .

Note the familiar diction here, and the slow, deliberate pacing—a girl taking her time as she does her work around the house. Even the long vowel sounds—“mild, slow, young,” etc. slow down the pacing of the poem. Again: whether you use meter and rime (as in the lines above), or write free verse, try to draw from the actual speech rhythms and vocabulary of what you hear around you, and what you yourself sound like when you talk. That is where poetry begins and ends: in how we speak, and the words we use, mostly in private, around friends and family. Comfortable words.