June 7, 2010

Thoughts on poetry.

I've loved poetry since discovering Walt Whitman freshman year of my undergrad. Since then, I've branched out a bit and have slowly made my way into more modern works.

My favorite poets are all dead. Walt Whitman died in 1892, Gerard Manley Hopkins died a few years before, Dylan Thomas in 1953, and Sylvia Plath ten years later.

But I decided to try out some poetry from people who are still alive. I figure the best place to start is with the Pulitzer Prize winners.

One of my goals for this year is to have read (or at least bought) all of the last ten years of Pulitzer Prize winners for poetry. And fiction, too, of which I have already read two: the 2000 and 2008 winners.

Last week I bought the 2010 Poetry winner from Powell's in Portland: Versed by Rae Armantrout. I haven't read much of Versed yet but what I have glanced through is exceedingly weird and sporadic.

One of the blurbs for Versed says her poetry is "like a string of prize chess moves..." and is a "poetics that not only centres its position in its uncertainty but insists that uncertainty remain at the centre of any position."

Earlier this year I picked up my first book of essays from Wendell Berry, titled Standing by Words. He has a more traditional view of poetry, one which I think Armantrout's eschews. Berry believes poetry should flow around a narrative but another blurb for Versed says Armantrout "has always aimed at knowing life by isolating it from narrative." For Berry, this makes poetry personal and musing but the musing doesn't touch on the deeper things of the soul or the philosophies of life. According to him, poetry is about truth. And he isn't talking about truth as a rigid, "This is right. This is wrong" sort of category, but rather the truth that revolves around a story. It's personal but explores what binds us all together. Of the virtues and ethics of a life lived well.

I think Berry would say poetry that centers itself in uncertainty cannot show us truth, which defeats its central purpose. He isn't saying poetry that explores the personal is useless (it can be very useful for the person who composes it) but rather that it can teach us little or nothing.

Whitman's poetry nearly always has a character, a flow, a connection from one life to the next. His 60 page poem, Song of Myself, is in many places pages and pages of descriptions of the people he meets and what it reveals about his identity and the world he enters.

The 2009 winner for poetry was W.S. Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius. It too is more modern than Whitman or Thomas, but has an energy in the words that stretch and bend and reach for truth and revelation. He is seeking, not merely brooding. This seems to be the difference between Armantrout and Merwin so far.

But something else Berry believes is that real poetry isn't easy reading.

Whitman has a simplicity to his words that lays lightly over the thick reality of love, sexuality and identity. Merwin uses words like "light" and "dark" to explore memories and what they say about death and eternity. Thomas creates puzzles, using words like "worm" and "maggot" to explore the themes of time, death, resurrection and purpose. All of these are complex, demanding you to sit quietly and take a closer look.

Armantrout's poetry, while erratic, probably has a purpose to it, if I will sit quietly and let it speak to me, I may discover what it is.

Berry has a fantastic quote here that depicts well why I love poetry:

"There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings."

Poetry is work, in a way a novel can never be. I wonder if where it blocks it does not also invite? Extending an invitation to life and uncertainty and as Berry calls it, our own "real work."