poetry

Recommended Essay: “Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America,” by Tony Hoagland

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Tony Hoagland’s piece in Harper’s, which you can read here, is long and worth the length. His opening salvo is a lament for the state of poetry in schools, and an argument for poetry’s necessity:

 . . . poetry is our common treasure-house, and we need its aliveness, its respect for the subconscious, its willingness to entertain ambiguity; we need its plaintive truth-telling about the human condition and its imaginative exhibitions of linguistic freedom, which confront the general culture’s more grotesque manipulations. We need the emotional training sessions poetry conducts us through. We need its previews of coming attractions: heartbreak, survival, failure, endurance, understanding, more heartbreak.

He’s certainly not the first to suggest that students (and sometimes teachers too!) have a difficult time engaging with non-contemporary poetry, but I like his concrete proposal for building a common American cultural vernacular: teach twenty contemporary poems to all students.

Now, I know there’s a lot of talk out there in the education world about Common Core standards, and I’m not going to get into it here (I have my doubts, to put it mildly.). But I do think it’s essential, as does Hoagland that we all share at least some cultural references in common. I’ve written before about the all-university summer reading requirement at Ohio State, and how wonderful that was.

As I used to tell my students, you’ll be awfully embarrassed at your in-laws’ cocktail party/barbecue/mini-golf outing/gallery opening if you don’t know who Hamlet is.

What I especially like about Mr. Hoagland’s piece is his suggestion that we do not jettison the classics, but rather work backwards toward them:

The cultural chain has been broken, as anyone paying attention knows. Moreover, the written word always needs renewal. Art must be recast continually. “Dover Beach” and “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” are not lost, but instead are being rewritten again and again, a hundred times for each new generation. Culture is always reanimating itself, and when it does so, it validates, reorganizes, and reinvigorates the past as well as the present.

If anthologies were structured to represent the way that most of us actually learn, they would begin in the present and “progress” into the past. I read Lawrence Ferlinghetti before I read D. H. Lawrence before I read Thomas Wyatt. Once the literate appetite is whetted, it will keep turning to new tastes. A reader who first falls in love with Billy Collins or Mary Oliver is likely then to drift into an anthology that includes Emily Dickinson and Thomas Hardy.

Brilliant. And true; pairing contemporary poems with older poems is an excellent teaching method, in my experience. Students are surprised (and thrilled) to learn just how sex-filled John Donne’s poetry is (oh is it ever), and that a good number of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written to a man.

You’ll find the list of twenty poems that Mr. Hoagland recommends at the end of his essay.  I’d add Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” and “Ecstatic in the Poison” by Andrew Hudgins. Which poem or poems would you add?

“I Love All Beauteous Things”

/ Carolyn O / 1 Comment

Robert Bridges’s fine poem is a brief, honestly joyous celebration of the beautiful, and our urge to create something beautiful ourselves. In the second stanza, he writes: “I too will something make / and joy in the making” even if his creation proves ephemeral.

One of the pleasures of this little poem, for me, is that it reminds me of one of my favorite children’s books, Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney. In the book, Miss Rumphius (as a child) is told by her grandfather that she must, over the course of her life, do something to make the world more beautiful.

Isn’t that lovely?

I’ve loved this book since I was a little girl, and when I’m feeling reflective, I remember the beautiful illustrations and ask myself if I’ve done anything lately to make the world more beautiful, and, more importantly, what I can still do.

Image courtesy of Tom Curtis/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of Tom Curtis / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

(I’ll let you find out for yourself what Miss Rumphius sets out to do.)

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

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I’ve been waiting weeks to work on this poem, with its famous final lines.

Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,”  from her 1990 book House of Light, just sings summer, and now summer’s here (with the accompanying mid-90s temperatures here in Boston), it’s time to learn it.

I’m slowly reading the whole volume, and I can’t believe that for years I’ve missed that Ms. Oliver is perhaps the best-known and most widely read poet in this country. A native of Northeast Ohio, Ms. Oliver now resides on Cape Cod (her poems celebrate its interior marshes more than its seashore), and since I grew up in Cleveland and now live in Boston (and married a man from Cape Cod), her poems often feel homey and familiar to me. I love the intimacy of her observations, the feeling, almost, of conversation. This feeling of casual grace is remarkable, because elsewhere Ms. Oliver has written that she revises most poems forty or fifty times!

If you’d like to recommend a favorite poet, please leave a comment! Who knows how many lovely voices I’ve been missing . . .

“under the house the stone / has its feet in deep water.”

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Yesterday, it was hot here. Eighty-five, I’d say. Cool water poured on the pavement turned instantly warm and finally, finally, it rained. The breeze was a relief, but even better was the enormous double rainbow that appeared over our town, and, it turns out, all over Boston.

The rainbows over our neighborhood last night

The rainbows over our neighborhood last night

This week, I’m working on Reginald Gibbons’s “At Noon,” a poem in which you can just feel the sweltering heat radiate away in a cool, dark room.  I especially love the image I’ve quoted in this post’s title: the house, like a child in a wading pool, cooling its heels.

“Composed in a shine of laughing”

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This week I’ve been thinking about some of the opening lines to Mrs. Dalloway, one of my top-five favorite books of all time, because really, these lines are as close as prose ever comes to poetry. Specifically, I’m thinking of:

And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh, as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge!

My son turned two this weekend, and because I was in the hospital for so long, I didn’t have the energy to throw him the little party we had planned. So instead, the three of us drove to our favorite beach, and just after it opened, we found ourselves with blue, blue skies, a crisp wind off the waves, and a warm tidal pool for H to play in. What a morning, indeed.

Fortuitously, today’s poem-of-the-day email from The Poetry Foundation brought just the right poem to my inbox: Marie Ponsot’s “Between,” a short, elegant poem about and for her adult daughter. It’s so lovely, a deft meditation on both parenthood and childhood that makes me wonder what it will be like to look at my own son in twenty, thirty years. For me, this is the eleven-line poetry analogue to Mrs. Dalloway, a way of seeing the past through the lens of the present, the everyday, the home.

“We / Strike straight”

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“We real cool” is one of those unforgettable, awesome poems — it’s summer, youth, and the brutal unfairness of racism all at once, in five terse couplets. Gwendolyn Brooks is brilliant — read any poem or an excerpt from Maud Martha, her only novel, and you’ll be hooked.

“The field as iridescent as a Renaissance heaven”

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I just downloaded The Poetry Foundation’s app for iPhone, and friends, it is swanky.  I lack the requisite hand-eye coordination for Angry Birds and other games you can play on a phone, so most of my apps are (a) free and (b) related to news or making lists. But this morning, sitting through yet another rendition of “Elmo’s World” on Sesame Street (my presence is requested at all viewings), it occurred to me that maybe I should search for a poetry app.

For me, this app is like a delightful game: pick a few thematic elements, and voila! Poems! Scrolling through today, I found the poem I’ll be memorizing this week, David St. John’s “In the High Country,” a lovely May meditation, particularly appropriate given the beautiful weather in Boston this afternoon (not to last, I’m sure).

“Three days of spring winter and suddenly / birds everywhere.”

/ Carolyn O / 2 Comments

I had a lovely Mother’s Day — thank you for asking! My husband gave me the gift of extra sleep in the morning, which was glorious, and I woke up to homemade biscuits smothered in hollandaise. Couldn’t have been better.

I was looking, this week, for a poem about mothers, but I find that they tend to be, necessarily, incredibly specific, tied to the poet’s or speaker’s own mother or conception of motherhood. And, as I thought about it further, I realized how difficult it would be for me, personally, to write a poem even about one small aspect of my relationship with my own (amazing, kind, generous, hard-working, accomplished, intelligent, warm, self-sacrificing) mother.

So I gave up, and nosed around for a poem that would express a little of the happiness I’ve felt over the last few weeks when enjoying time with my son (it’s only my second Mother’s Day), and I came across Kathy Fagan’s “Letter from the Garden,” from her 2002 book The Charm.

Now, a disclaimer here: Professor Fagan teaches at my alma mater, and while I never had the privilege of taking one of her courses, several of my friends did, and I’ve met Professor Fagan once or twice, though there’s no way she’d remember me. Personal feelings and alumni pride aside, she’s a wonderful poet, and you should head over to your local bookseller and ask for one of her books.

“Letter from the Garden” has nothing to do with mothers and sons — it’s addressed to a lover — but what made me choose it this week is the poem’s attention to birds, filling the space of early spring, appearing “everywhere.” We’ve had that experience this year. I rather dislike birds (excepting only penguins, owls, and ducks) and their beady, gold-rimmed or black-pooling eyes and reptilian feet. Flying dinosaurs.

My son, however, loves them. He stares at them from the dining room windows. He chases every single one he sees, despite the fact that they always flee from him, and seeing ducks in a pond or robins at the cemetery is the highlight of many a weekend.

looking at the birds

 

Two weeks ago, we saw a wholly golden-yellow small bird (a finch?) alight on a tree next to us, and he turned to me and whispered, “Quiiiiii–et”; when it disappeared, he determined that it was sleeping, and that’s why it wouldn’t come back. I try now to see the birds through his eyes: the graceful hops and undignified racing for the trees when they see his little body bopping toward them, the sudden, knowing turn of the head.