How to Read Poetry Today
By DAVID KIRBY
BEAUTIFUL AND POINTLESS
A Guide to Modern Poetry
By David Orr
200 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99.
Some years ago, I wrote a poem called “Broken Promises,” which was adopted by the Poetry Out Loud project for its annual competition, meaning that high school students can recite it or one of several hundred other poems and maybe advance through regional and state competitions to the nationals, where some serious money is at stake. “Broken Promises” deals with just that: the promises we break and how they limp around and gaze at us reproachfully while enjoying an immortality denied to the promises we’ve kept.
Recently, I spoke with a group of high school teachers who wanted to discuss my famous poem — rather, to tell me what it meant. “It’s about your own poems!” said one teacher, and another shouted, “I think it’s about your children!” They seemed a little crestfallen when I said, no, the poem is about the promises we break, as the ¬title and, as far as that goes, the poem itself says.
The teachers thought that my poem said one thing but meant another, and that it’s the reader’s job to figure out what the poet is really saying. No wonder poetry doesn’t have a bigger audience. All that code cracking. Who has the time?
David Orr, that’s who — though in “Beautiful and Pointless,” his new guide to modern poetry, the most important thing he reveals about codes is that there aren’t any. True, no poem speaks to us as directly as a stop sign or a Star of David. But nobody listens to a Jay-Z song and says, “Hmm, I wonder what he meant by that,” and a well-made poem works the same way. Susan Sontag once wrote an essay advocating “an erotics of art,” and that’s the main point of Orr’s passionate, nimble little book: that poetry is for lovers, not cryptologists.
Orr came to poetry as a sophomore in college, when he bought Philip Larkin’s book “The Whitsun Weddings” by mistake. (It seems as though half of the poetry addicts out there got started on Larkin; somebody really needs to look into the role of his poems as a gateway drug.) The poetry columnist for the Book Review, Orr is also an attorney, which makes sense: a good poem, like a sound legal argument, puts the right materials in the best order so as to convince an audience. A lawyer doesn’t want his listeners to say, “I wonder what he meant” any more than a poet does.
But just as you can’t predict the outcome of a trial, so, too, does poetry work in mysterious ways. Consider 9/11. Orr relies heavily on Google to research the state of poetry (more on this later), and he gets 237,000 hits when he puts the phrase “bearing witness” plus “poetry” into that site’s search window.
Now every poet I know, me included, has borne witness in poetry to the events of 9/11. Yet the poem that speaks best to that tragedy is W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” — written just after Germany’s invasion of Poland but, as Peter Steinfels has noted in The Times, “endlessly quoted and reprinted” after the 2001 attack “to express grief over what had happened and foreboding about what was to come.” The recent poet laureate Kay Ryan’s “Home to Roost” is another poem often associated with Sept. 11, but it, too, was written before the attacks.
So if poets can’t serve immediate political ends, what should we expect from them? (Besides liberal rhetoric, I mean: “Almost all poets, including myself, lean left,” Orr says. “There are maybe five conservative American poets, not one of whom can safely show his face at a writing conference for fear of being angrily doused with herbal tea.”) Orr quotes another former poet laureate, Rita Dove, as saying “poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful,” but he argues that the Nike slogan “Just do it” is more distilled than anything James Merrill ever wrote, and that Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” beats William Carlos Williams for sheer power every time. Then does poetry express our innermost selves, as is often claimed? Maybe, but most people get the same validation from other sources. As far as poetry speaking for the culture it springs from, Orr says, so might “joining the Coney Island Polar Bear Club or collecting interesting bits of bark.”
In the end, poetry matters to the people it matters to for the same reason that anything appeals to anyone, which is that they love it. Orr uses the title of the poet Edward Hirsch’s book “How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry” to suggest that people who fall for poetry fall hard. In a book filled with excellent quotations, he surprisingly doesn’t cite James Dickey’s line — “What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe” — but essentially his book says just that.
This will come as no surprise to many. But what makes “Beautiful and Pointless” different from thousands of other defenses of poetry is that, according to its author, poetry differs from music and stamp collecting in that people’s love for poetry is measurably greater than their love for any other activity. Poetry fans don’t just love poetry a little; they really love it.
To test that hypothesis, Orr went to Google and conducted two different searches, one for “I like X” and one for “I love X,” with X being represented by baseball, cooking, gardening and half a dozen other activities, including movies and poetry. Admittedly, the science behind this research is slightly less complicated than that required to make a lemon meringue pie, but the results are noteworthy. In every instance except two, more people “like” an activity than “love” it; for example, readers of romance novels like that art form 3.36 times more than they love it. The exceptions are poker, which splits 50-50, and — of course — poetry, whose partisans “love” it twice as much as they “like” it.
Why is that? Hard to say, and Orr doesn’t argue for distillation or power or any of the other rationales he shot down earlier. Instead, he ends “Beautiful and Pointless” with an account of the final days of his father, who suffered from cancer and had a stroke that left his speech flat and affectless. The therapist recommended some exercises, and then Orr had an idea: why not poetry? That is, why not use an art form with obvious stresses and rhymes, especially one people love so much?
The first thing he learns is that you shouldn’t ask a stroke victim to read Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose crowded lines are difficult enough for those of us with full use of our tongues. And Robert Frost isn’t much better.
In the end, the senior Orr develops a crush on “The Owl and the Pussycat,” Edward Lear’s classic tribute to interspecies romance. The two lovers elope in a pea-green boat, and after a voyage of a year and a day, are married and dine “on mince, and slices of quince, / Which they ate with a runcible spoon,” and they dance by the light of the moon.
Orr’s father tells him, “I really like the runcible spoon,” and that’s close enough to love for me.
David Kirby’s latest poetry collection is “Talking About Movies With Jesus.”
Reposted from the New York Times Sunday Book Review
By DAVID KIRBY
BEAUTIFUL AND POINTLESS
A Guide to Modern Poetry
By David Orr
200 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99.
Some years ago, I wrote a poem called “Broken Promises,” which was adopted by the Poetry Out Loud project for its annual competition, meaning that high school students can recite it or one of several hundred other poems and maybe advance through regional and state competitions to the nationals, where some serious money is at stake. “Broken Promises” deals with just that: the promises we break and how they limp around and gaze at us reproachfully while enjoying an immortality denied to the promises we’ve kept.
Recently, I spoke with a group of high school teachers who wanted to discuss my famous poem — rather, to tell me what it meant. “It’s about your own poems!” said one teacher, and another shouted, “I think it’s about your children!” They seemed a little crestfallen when I said, no, the poem is about the promises we break, as the ¬title and, as far as that goes, the poem itself says.
The teachers thought that my poem said one thing but meant another, and that it’s the reader’s job to figure out what the poet is really saying. No wonder poetry doesn’t have a bigger audience. All that code cracking. Who has the time?
David Orr, that’s who — though in “Beautiful and Pointless,” his new guide to modern poetry, the most important thing he reveals about codes is that there aren’t any. True, no poem speaks to us as directly as a stop sign or a Star of David. But nobody listens to a Jay-Z song and says, “Hmm, I wonder what he meant by that,” and a well-made poem works the same way. Susan Sontag once wrote an essay advocating “an erotics of art,” and that’s the main point of Orr’s passionate, nimble little book: that poetry is for lovers, not cryptologists.
Orr came to poetry as a sophomore in college, when he bought Philip Larkin’s book “The Whitsun Weddings” by mistake. (It seems as though half of the poetry addicts out there got started on Larkin; somebody really needs to look into the role of his poems as a gateway drug.) The poetry columnist for the Book Review, Orr is also an attorney, which makes sense: a good poem, like a sound legal argument, puts the right materials in the best order so as to convince an audience. A lawyer doesn’t want his listeners to say, “I wonder what he meant” any more than a poet does.
But just as you can’t predict the outcome of a trial, so, too, does poetry work in mysterious ways. Consider 9/11. Orr relies heavily on Google to research the state of poetry (more on this later), and he gets 237,000 hits when he puts the phrase “bearing witness” plus “poetry” into that site’s search window.
Now every poet I know, me included, has borne witness in poetry to the events of 9/11. Yet the poem that speaks best to that tragedy is W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” — written just after Germany’s invasion of Poland but, as Peter Steinfels has noted in The Times, “endlessly quoted and reprinted” after the 2001 attack “to express grief over what had happened and foreboding about what was to come.” The recent poet laureate Kay Ryan’s “Home to Roost” is another poem often associated with Sept. 11, but it, too, was written before the attacks.
So if poets can’t serve immediate political ends, what should we expect from them? (Besides liberal rhetoric, I mean: “Almost all poets, including myself, lean left,” Orr says. “There are maybe five conservative American poets, not one of whom can safely show his face at a writing conference for fear of being angrily doused with herbal tea.”) Orr quotes another former poet laureate, Rita Dove, as saying “poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful,” but he argues that the Nike slogan “Just do it” is more distilled than anything James Merrill ever wrote, and that Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” beats William Carlos Williams for sheer power every time. Then does poetry express our innermost selves, as is often claimed? Maybe, but most people get the same validation from other sources. As far as poetry speaking for the culture it springs from, Orr says, so might “joining the Coney Island Polar Bear Club or collecting interesting bits of bark.”
In the end, poetry matters to the people it matters to for the same reason that anything appeals to anyone, which is that they love it. Orr uses the title of the poet Edward Hirsch’s book “How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry” to suggest that people who fall for poetry fall hard. In a book filled with excellent quotations, he surprisingly doesn’t cite James Dickey’s line — “What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe” — but essentially his book says just that.
This will come as no surprise to many. But what makes “Beautiful and Pointless” different from thousands of other defenses of poetry is that, according to its author, poetry differs from music and stamp collecting in that people’s love for poetry is measurably greater than their love for any other activity. Poetry fans don’t just love poetry a little; they really love it.
To test that hypothesis, Orr went to Google and conducted two different searches, one for “I like X” and one for “I love X,” with X being represented by baseball, cooking, gardening and half a dozen other activities, including movies and poetry. Admittedly, the science behind this research is slightly less complicated than that required to make a lemon meringue pie, but the results are noteworthy. In every instance except two, more people “like” an activity than “love” it; for example, readers of romance novels like that art form 3.36 times more than they love it. The exceptions are poker, which splits 50-50, and — of course — poetry, whose partisans “love” it twice as much as they “like” it.
Why is that? Hard to say, and Orr doesn’t argue for distillation or power or any of the other rationales he shot down earlier. Instead, he ends “Beautiful and Pointless” with an account of the final days of his father, who suffered from cancer and had a stroke that left his speech flat and affectless. The therapist recommended some exercises, and then Orr had an idea: why not poetry? That is, why not use an art form with obvious stresses and rhymes, especially one people love so much?
The first thing he learns is that you shouldn’t ask a stroke victim to read Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose crowded lines are difficult enough for those of us with full use of our tongues. And Robert Frost isn’t much better.
In the end, the senior Orr develops a crush on “The Owl and the Pussycat,” Edward Lear’s classic tribute to interspecies romance. The two lovers elope in a pea-green boat, and after a voyage of a year and a day, are married and dine “on mince, and slices of quince, / Which they ate with a runcible spoon,” and they dance by the light of the moon.
Orr’s father tells him, “I really like the runcible spoon,” and that’s close enough to love for me.
David Kirby’s latest poetry collection is “Talking About Movies With Jesus.”
Reposted from the New York Times Sunday Book Review
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