Why Read Poetry by Marilyn Shapley
Books. Big fat novels of other people’s lives and imaginations lay in disarray throughout my house. Their bright covers beckon, especially the ones with gold-fonted hard covers. These books are places to lose your life, page by page; like sleep, a way to waste time, to follow another’s words down a lane of forgetting. Afterward, they sit on shelves or lay in dusty corners, are stuffed into rotting cardboard boxes and congregate in attics, waiting to grab my attention once again.
But the pull of those slim poetry volumes don’t relinquish quite as easily—graceful, terse, indifferent if I read them or not, they might as well be admonishing, Go away, you ungrateful wretch. Read us if you will, but you will not understand our carefully constructed words. How could they know that their words cease to be words at all to me but become, instead, an artist’s brush (or more nearly the paint itself ), bold strokes and small nuances that I am sure to miss on first reading. I sit with them, study them as I would a work of art in a gallery, straining to discover the artist’s essence on the canvas or catch the one detail of great importance to him. Sometimes it is a fleeting beauty that cannot be described regardless of the medium used — paint, glass, ink or paper — whatever it is, is just there, a moment of discovery tucked away in a remote place, preserved for the discriminating viewer or, in my case, fearful reader.
It is not without forethought, and some forcing, that I open books of poetry because once I am in, I can’t get out. I read, begin to nod my head yes, yes, then utter a string of dark dissents. Closing the book becomes even harder than opening it, and I worry that by doing so I will miss the key to some vital message, that I will never get back to this particular place—whether physical, mental, or emotional—to find it.
Contemporary poets, old modern poets, classicists, and home-made poets all affect me in the same way. Reading them makes me want to craft my own words to lay alongside theirs, to say that I understand, that I know about those broken fragments of images floating just behind the eyes, their edges rough or smooth, waiting to be picked up by my pen and placed in a pulsing line. I have been there.
Maybe I could accomplish this same thing in a novel or short story or play (I do enjoy writing plays), but I have chosen to write in a form that the world, in general, shies away from. Poems can be daunting vistas. A friend once said to me, speaking of her dislike for poetry, “I am an ostrich; I keep my head in the sand.” I wanted to scream at her, “Pull it out and take a chance!” But since I am a dubious character—because of the poet in me—I kept silent.
I can’t help but bow to the old gods and goddesses and to the muses who stepped in to claim me. For poetry has chosen me, and I am now forever in love with dashes, short lines that stop action to let thought in, pauses and white space, the breath of the human heart beating in iambs, and the puzzle of the whole experience of the poem racing ahead of me.
Marilyn Shapley is Poetry Editor for Rose & Thorn Journal.
This is brilliant and beautifully (poet!) written...
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Thanks love--always a plus to know you are in my corner--love, m
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Well played, M. Poetry IS a painted canvas inviting readers in to view and contribute to the author's expression and contribute with impressions of their own. In additions, the most effective prose is driven by poetic construction.
Let critics ponder
discuss
debate, what is
she saying, why did
he paint? This
is no photo, so plain
it ain't; we prate
the shadows, you interpret. So
pen that canvas with
pastel graze
or broad stroke word scene cafe days
in similes of mime shaped ways
and knowing smiles
of Impression's phrase.
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Thanks for the kudos and your poem also--I do think that poetry and painting are one and the same--alas, I am no good with the brush!
You also have the words--'broad stroke word scene cafe days' will stick with me for some time. Thanks Wil
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Grand!
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Merci, my friend, love m
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