200. Poetry

I really love poetry. With poetry you can say hundreds of thousands of things with few words as you evoke images in the minds of readers. I love to read poetry and see what I can of what the author intended. I love to write poetry by just tinkering with thoughts on paper and playing with the words for days on end, perhaps years. While it’s easy to fixate on ideas and images in a poem for a few days it’s also fun to set them aside for a long while and see if you can even remember what the fixation was, see if the poem can bring all of that back or was it as insubstantial as a mist? If it holds some of the ideas you can call it good or you can work with it some more. Poems are living, breathing works of art that gain their life, not from the author alone, but also from the readers. So many poems just wash up on the shore as good as a bit of plastic while others take on new shapes from the beatings of the waves and sand.

American poetry is quite different from other English forms even as it clings to the similarities of the shared language. A favourite poem in Canada may evade any favoritism in the United States, yet another might plant poppies all over the world from Flanders, Belgium to Potlatch, Idaho all because of a Canadian poet who has us weeping for the lost generation of young men over a century ago. That same thing applies to an American poem. Say “Nevermore” anywhere in the English-speaking world and images of ravens will pop into the heads of most of the listeners. All of the practising of writing in England might do nothing for the practicing of writing in the United States, yet it may also bequeath the eternal question, “To be or not to be?” The subtleties of the simple spelling of a word might evoke an accent, a way of seeing things, an Americanism that an American simply won’t notice until it’s pointed out by someone of the same tongue in a foreign land. The lives of the words are made by the lives of the speakers as they write and as they read. It’s truly remarkable, truly beautiful.

I have often written sketchy, bad poems in my journal only to return to a single image that held on to me and caused me to return over and over to the same bad poem just tweaking a word, phrase, or line here or there only to come back and shift it a little more. At the same time that little poem shifts things in me so that I think about something differently than I ever had before. When someone reads a poem and actually hears/sees the poetic presentation their thoughts are likely to change just a little bit as well. Poems do that to people just like the author does it to the poem. The good poems outlive the author and continue to influence others for years, maybe centuries into the future. I’m still being affected by a reclusive woman in Massachusetts who hardly published any of her poems in her lifetime, yet her family had them published after her death and now they are in American high school text books imprinting their images of “Hope is the thing with feathers.” That crazy white-haired dude from New York who traipsed all about the country and mourned bitterly at the assassination of Lincoln, “Oh Captain! my Captain!” still has his voice sounding on Levi’s commercials. And what of the living poets who tweak my thoughts with poems about their Cuban grandmother telling them not to act a certain way? I’m just constantly, daily immersing myself in the lives of poets who are living still, even as the last breaths have expired from their bodies as they left those beautiful little collections of words with me, with us. I simply love poetry.