Who Reads Poetry: 50 Views from Poetry Magazine
240
Who Reads Poetry: 50 Views from Poetry Magazine
240eBook
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Overview
Who reads poetry? We know that poets do, but what about the rest of us? When and why do we turn to verse? Seeking the answer, Poetry magazine since 2005 has published a column called “The View From Here,” which has invited readers from outside the world of poetry to describe what has drawn them to poetry. Over the years, contributors have included philosophers, journalists, musicians, and artists, as well as doctors and soldiers, an ironworker, an anthropologist, and an economist. This collection brings together fifty compelling pieces, in turns surprising, provocative, touching, and funny.
Anthropologist Helen Fisher turns to poetry while researching the effects of love on the brain: “As other anthropologists have studied fossils, arrowheads, or pot shards to understand human thought, I studied poetry . . . . I wasn’t disappointed: everywhere poets have described the emotional fallout produced by the brain’s eruptions.” The rapper Rhymefest attests to the self-actualizing power of poems: “Words can create worlds, and I’ve discovered that poetry can not only be read but also lived out. My life is a poem.” Musician Neko Case calls poetry “a delicate, pretty lady with a candy exoskeleton on the outside of her crepe-paper dress.” And music critic Alex Ross tells us that he keeps a paperback of The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens on his desk next to other, more utilitarian books like a German dictionary, a King James Bible, and a Mac troubleshooting manual. Contributors also include Ai Weiwei, Christopher Hitchens, Kay Redfield Jamison, Lynda Barry, and more.
“The diversity of the authors results in an exceptionally broad range of topics and perspectives . . . Many of the contributors also tell intimate stories about poetry’s place in their personal lives. Sasaki and Share have chosen these pieces well.” —Publishers Weekly
“Funny, moving and inspiring.” —The Australian
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226504933 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 625 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
IT IS NOTHING LIKE THAT
Though most days are an easy routine, people who spend their lives in operating rooms know that something awful is only one burst blood vessel, one uncontrolled infection, one random biological reversal away from ending a perfectly contented life. Our biochemistry makes sure things work well most of the time. But then, what are the possibilities for any two strands of DNA to become entwined? The lurking of chance that gives one person a ruptured aneurysm at twenty-five while permitting another to develop comfortable habits and drop dead at eighty-nine is what makes the poetics of doctoring.
When chance seized the teacher, football player, poet — and my patient — Richard Blessing, he was a lot like me: early forties, athletic, a reader, in love with his life. And then one day as he forced a graduate student to go to his left on the basketball court, a convulsion dropped Professor Blessing to the hardwood. Boom. A successful, happy life had turned into a sad one. Difficult, painful, short.
After eighteen months of his illness, Dick paid very close attention to words. CT scan, MRI, tumor, biopsy, radiation, and chemo are the vocabulary of the sick; because of his nature, the words circulated around the tumor in Dick's brain and came out as poems. What I said to him rattled around in there too. I was out of town when he suddenly got worse. "Is it now?" he asked. "Maybe," I told him from that other coast. "Probably." When I got back to Seattle two days later he was comatose, rolled up on his side facing a wall, eyes closed. He stayed that way for a week.
Then he woke up and lived another year.
His collection A Closed Book includes a short poem titled "Directions for Dying." This title wasn't rhetorical, of course. I couldn't save him, a man of my own age and habits. Was I useless? Was there no justice? Well, no. Much of biology is chance and cannot be altered or avoided even by the acceptance of some infinite force outside of space and time. Medicine only alters the course of things slightly. Doctors have wonderfully exact therapies to influence some diseases, but not all. We don't treat many cancers very well, or genetic diseases, or age. And treatment, of course, isn't the same as cure. Sometimes the best treatments are nothing but advice and comfort.
While my reading of prose has helped me understand much that I didn't know, poetry is a way to better see the things I might know deep down but cannot (or will not) say. Poems create empathy. The person with the knife in hand requires a better understanding of "maybe" than the training provides. While contemporary people, and perhaps surgeons in particular, tend to believe that they are in charge of their destiny and the fate of others, in truth we are adrift in a universe only partially visible to us, and we insist on guessing about the rest of it. Camus said that physicists were reduced to poetry — and that was before string theory. Denise Levertov called our handle on life in the universe "this great unknowing." In her late poem, "Primary Wonder," she writes about the mystery that there is anything, anything at all — let alone everything.
It is this everything that poetry helps reveal in our operating rooms and clinics. One task of medicine is to predict the direction of chance, to help patients prepare for what will probably happen. But that's so small a part of why people consult doctors. What about what could happen, or should happen, or might not? What about the ambush of the least likely? Isaac Babel wrote that the essence of art is unexpectedness, and it is in these side channels of life where poetry is a better guide than a textbook.
Forty years ago, when I was in medical school, I believed in this work as science. But clinical medicine has become a business of technology, not science. The latter is a way of looking at the universe. The former is method functioning within established statistical rules. And method may be industrialized. It is very difficult to jam into the same mind an industrial worldview and a humanistic one, which is why many medical schools now have formed departments of "humanities in medicine." It really is love and work that define our communal life: medical students and residents must learn that. Young people learning to be doctors require poets. It is poetry that shows them, as Dick Blessing wrote regarding his own approaching death, that
It is not like entering a mirror nor like closing a door Nor like going to sleep in a hammock of bones.
CHAPTER 2
BETTER SPEAK
My first meaningful interaction with poets came as a young adult when my friends and I would frequent open mics at poetry cafés in New York and DC. There are two defining moments. First, my mother, Deborah Willis, invited poet Sekou Sundiata to perform his opus The Circle Unbroken Is a Hard Bop at the Smithsonian. Soon after that my friend Nekisha gave me a mixtape of spoken word that included Nikki Giovanni's "The Way I Feel" and the Watts Prophets' "Rapping Black." I was in awe of the courage and shameless earnestness and vulnerability in their work. I felt the sharp contrast between the optimism and determination of the civil rights generation and the oblique nihilism of mine. They all but indicted the listeners for remaining silent or irreverent when times called for social or moral action.
A few years later I encountered Audre Lorde's "Litany for Survival." The last few lines are emblazoned on my soul:
and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.
"Better to speak!" echoes in my mind whenever I feel like shriveling up and hiding in the corner rather than being exposed or critiqued. There is sheer audacity required to write words for a broader audience, even more to get up and read those words aloud. I feel the same is true for contemporary visual artists. To speak is almost to say "I know," but in most cases artists are speaking about things they don't know, or are still in the process of knowing. I feel like poetry is at its best when it speaks to this process of knowing, dangling on your heart right before it gets to your mind.
So much of my practice is a collaboration with audiences and other artists — sometimes it's overt, sometimes subversive. As it happens, I was introduced to the notion of collaboration by Kamal Sinclair (now a collaborator of mine on Question Bridge: Black Males) who worked with a combination of poets, dancers, and musicians to write a multifaceted off-Broadway stage show called The Beat. It was a come-as-you-are and leave-your-heart-on-the-stage experience. That was around the time Danny Hoch wrote Jails, Hospitals and Hip Hop. I saw the written word translated into spoken word as activism.
And then there is Saul Williams, whom I first encountered on a student film shoot at NYU in the late nineties. It was an adaptation of Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues." Saul was Sonny. After two days I was basically a disciple. I'll never forget the moment he picked up a kalimba (African thumb piano) off a coffee table on set. He strummed it a bit, then turned it over and found an old Burger King sticker on it. He said, "Now that's deeper than all of us," and put it down. Not two years later I was creating work about commodity culture as it related to African American history and culture.
Without a doubt, the best text-based work of mine came from an adaptation of an iconic sign from the civil rights era that read "I am a man." I was always amazed by the power of the image of a large group of African American men holding signs to affirm their "manhood." It also seemed to exemplify the fissure between my generation and my parents' generation. After all, the phrase we used was "I am the man." How did we go from a collective statement under the repression of segregation to an apparently selfish statement for a generation "liberated" by integration?
I wanted to explore that, so I created a series of twenty paintings in which I riffed on the syntax of the sign. The paintings were then arranged into a poem format with the help of a songwriter named Sparlha Swa. The last ten of them read "I'm the man, who's the man, you the man, what a man, I am man, I am Human, I am many, I am am I, I am I am, I am. Amen." Rather than judge or validate myself on anyone else's standards, maybe my greatest gift is my own consciousness. I am. Amen. Or as Langston Hughes put it,
So since I'm still here livin',
CHAPTER 3
OUT THERE
I was suffering from Weltschmerz one day (translation: woe for the world). My chest was hurting.
I call my dear friend Marie (the poet Marie Howe).
"Marie, my heart hurts."
"You have Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven, right? There's a poem at the beginning. I can't remember the name. The first line is something like, 'sorrow everywhere.' Read it to me."
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
from "A Brief for the Defense"
I finish reading the poem. Neither one of us says anything for a moment. Breathe. I look up. I see a tree through the window. I hear a robin singing. I see the sky. Clouds gently moving.
A poet told me that the job description of the poet is to say the unsayable. Another poet said no matter which way you cut it poems are about emotion. They are about deep emotion.
My work (acting) involves emotions. How do I translate the emotions into something actable? How do I sort through them? Specify and name them? A poet once told me that originally the poet's job was to name things of this world.
In a way, I am trying to name things with my emotions.
When I begin work on a script I go from the beginning and distill each scene down to its essence. And then I try to name each scene with a word or two or more. It's almost as if I'm trying to write a poem for each scene, articulating the inchoate, indescribable, unknowable. So I go through the script and I go through and through it, with my mind and without it. Much the same way as when I'm reading a poem. And then I put the script down when the play or movie begins. Good acting, like a good poem, remains mysterious to me. I couldn't tell you what it means, but I know it.
I used to try so hard to understand a poem. I was being vigilant instead of receptive. If the poem is saying the unsayable, I don't need to articulate it back to myself with words. The poet has done that for me. If poems are about emotions, then that is the language I need to use when I'm reading them. Poetry has helped me become more versed, so to speak, in the language of emotion.
I would be thrilled if I could be as "out there" with my acting as poets are with their poems. Leaping toward the stuff that is bubbling around us, unseen but felt. It's uncharted and raw — a kind of pure, undiluted matter brought back for those who want it:
This sky like an infinite tenderness, I have caught glimpses of that, often, so often, and never yet have I described it, I can't, somehow, I never will.
from Walking to Martha's Vineyard, by Franz Wright
CHAPTER 4
THE MADNESS OF THE GODS
I study the brain in love. My colleagues and I have put forty-nine people who were madly in love into a brain scanner (fMRI). Seventeen had just fallen happily in love; fifteen had just been rejected in love; seventeen were men and women in their fifties who maintained they were still "in love" with their spouse after an average of twenty-one years of marriage. All showed activity in a tiny factory near the base of the brain that pumps out dopamine, the neural liquor that gives you the energy, focus, craving, and motivation associated with intense romantic passion — what the ancient Greeks called "the madness of the gods."
But before I launched these brain-scanning projects, I searched the academic literature for the constellation of psychological symptoms linked with romantic love. More exciting to me, I also read poetry from around the world. As other anthropologists have studied fossils, arrowheads, or potsherds to understand human thought, I studied poetry to understand the lover's besotted brain. I wasn't disappointed: everywhere, poets have described the emotional fallout produced by the brain's eruptions as one becomes engulfed with romantic fervor.
Take "special meaning": as you fall in love, you begin to regard your beloved as special, unique, unlike any other. "Juliet is the sun," Romeo exclaims. The Indian poet Kabir writes, "The lane of love is narrow — there is room for only one." And in The Jade Goddess, the twelfth-century Chinese fable, Chang Po says to his beloved, "Since heaven and earth were created, you were made for me and I will not let you go." Then the lover begins to dote on every tiny aspect of the beloved. Most can list what they do not like about their sweetheart. But they sweep these details aside to concentrate on what they adore. The car the beloved drives is different from every other car in the parking lot. The street this person lives on, the music he listens to, the books she reads: everything related to the beloved grips the lover's attention. As the ninth-century Chinese poet Yuan Chen wrote,
I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat:
"Love is blynd al day," says Chaucer, and as the passion grows, this brain bath of dopamine fills the lover with restless energy, euphoria when things are going well, mood swings into despair when shunned. "This whirlwind, this delirium of Eros," Robert Lowell called it. Bodily responses accompany this mental storm. Ono No Komachi, a ninth-century female Japanese poet, wrote, "I lie awake, hot / the growing fires of passion / bursting, blazing in my heart." These bodily insurrections — from butterflies in the stomach to sweaty palms, weak knees, and a pounding heart — are probably the result of norepinephrine, a chemical closely related to dopamine.
So begins a physical and mental addiction to another human being, an addiction often portrayed in verse. "O, I willingly stake all for you," were Whitman's words. And an anonymous eighth-century Japanese poet summed up this craving: "My longing has no time when it ceases." But I think Plato best expressed what is happening in the lover's brain. In The Symposium he writes that the God of Love "lives in a state of need." Romantic love is a need, a want, a craving, a homeostatic imbalance, a drive that arises from primitive regions of the mammalian brain, giving us the energy, focus, and motivation to win a mating partner — life's greatest prize.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Who Reads Poetry"
by .
Copyright © 2017 The Poetry Foundation.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Don Share Introduction·
Richard Rapport It Is Nothing like That
Hank Willis Thomas Better Speak
Lili Taylor Out There
Helen Fisher The Madness of the Gods
Natalie Y. Moore Love Jones
·
Roger Ebert All My Heart for Speech
Archie Rand They Could Croon
Leopold Froehlich One-Track Mind
Naomi Beckwith The Necessary Fluster
Mary Schmich Poetry, Daily
Jia Tolentino Knowing Nothing
·
Iain McGilchrist Four Walls
Roxane Gay A Place for Poetry
Lt. Gen. William James Lennox Jr. Romance and Reality
Stephen T. Ziliak Haiku Economics
Nalini Nadkarni Green I Love You Green
Tracey Johnstone The True Nature
Alex Ross The Idea of Order
Fernando Perez Para Rumbiar
Nicholas Photinos Lucid, Inescapable Rhythms
Alfred Molina “Two Loves I Have . . .”
·
Momus Written in Rock Candy
Will Oldham To Hell with Drawers
Rhymefest My Life Is a Poem
Jolie Holland Loosening the Grip
Rob Kenner Word’s Worth
Neko Case My Flaming Hamster Wheel of Panic about Publicly Discussing Poetry in This Respected Forum
Sally Timms Poetry Out Loud
·
Anders Nilsen Poetry Is Useless
·
Lynda Barry Poetry Is a Dumb- Ass Spider
Kay Redfield Jamison Wild Unrest
Richard Rorty The Fire of Life
Matt Fitzgerald Gloriously Undone
Jerry Boyle Debris
Josh Warn On the Road with Wallace and Wystan
Xeni Jardin Everything Moves to Live
·
Amy Frykholm Earthward
Daniel Handler Happy, Snappy, Sappy
Michaelanne Petrella Like, a Noticeable Amount of Pee
Ai Weiwei On Poetry
Christopher Hitchens Imperfect Recall
·
Etienne Ndayishimiye Dust and Stones
Mariame Kaba Imagining Freedom
Aleksandar Hemon Sarajevo Blues
Jeffrey Brown Reporting Poetry
Rachel Cohen Like Soldiers Marching
Pankaj Mishra Rama Stores
Omar Kholeif To Speak with Many Tongues at Once
Chris Hedges How with This Rage
·
Acknowledgments
Contributors