The trouble with a good poem is that, at some point, you can’t say what is good about it, I don’t think. I mean, to switch tracks just a second, the reason I love Those Darlins is because I feel like they love the deep and wide history of American music and dip their legs in it to keep cool on hot days. And when you listen to them, it is the equivalent of sitting at the edge of the pool with them, water between your toes, hot sun over head, and someone calling from the kitchen “Who needs a beer?”
And yet, when you listen to them and I ask you, “Can you hear the cool history of America?” that’s not a question that really has an answer we can share.
And so it is with poems, you know?
It pisses me off so much that poetry is supposed to be fru-fru and that reading it and liking it is not a pursuit of “real” people.
Who else can say so much about real people?
My favorite times are not just the ones where you are knee-deep in the waters of America, but those very rare times where someone shocks the water and you are just one point among many all humming in a pleasure bordering on something beyond death, where all the voices are making noise, and you get to try to hear them.
Filed under: America how can I write a holy litany in your silly moo
I kind of startled at that first sentence because, well, it’s my job to talk about what’s good about poems. Or rather, what’s interesting about them. Or I guess, what they are doing and how they do it.
And my response started to break apart there, because I do think you’re right, and it’s going to have to be part of my teaching strategy in the fall – look, guys, I know that this poem is going to mean something different to each of you the first time you read it. And although I am going to teach you how to find the strongest argument for what a poem means – and to persuade other people to agree with you – I can’t make you and don’t want you to lose what it meant specifically to you.
And to me, the most interesting literary criticism is up front about what the author, herself, brings to the reading of a thing.
It’s neat how even though language can’t communicate everything humans know and feel, we still have ways to communicate those things anyway. When I get home I’ll check out these darlins you’ve been on about.
It pisses me off so much that poetry is supposed to be fru-fru and that reading it and liking it is not a pursuit of “real” people.
you could start
by doing your posts
in bursts – like
this.
and then it looks like poetry
even if it has no meter
(or even some frail,
superimposed, self-conscious,
contrived structure, as such)
other than odd
line feeds
carriage returns
voila
verse
Ha, Andy, true enough. But I still would love if there were more of that.