Curses! Poetry Month Again!

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
          yet men die miserably every day
                    for lack
of what is found there.
-"Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," William Carlos Williams

Jaded and cynical as I am, I'm not usually all that enthusiastic about events like, say, Women's History Month (March) or Black History Month (February). As a rule, they rank up there with Secretary's Day (April 26th this year) and the artificially inflated Valentine's, Mother's, and Father's Days as hype to assuage the conscience and to sell merchandise tinged with more guilt. Then there's National Poetry Month, which is, appropriately (if you're a T.S. Eliot fan) the cruelest month, April.

Unlike the other so-called holidays (a word, remember, concatenated from "holy" and "day" which makes it a little blasphemous to my mind when used in connection with secretaries) there's no pressure to buy a book or send anyone flowers (though you can buy a poster), and you can get a free poem in your e-mail every day for the duration, listen to a podcast (now you don't have to go out to experience the excruciating tedium of a reading!), check out other people's favorite lines and add your own. Though I sound a bit snide about it, I actually love National Poetry Month, because I love poetry. I'm glad I was introduced to it at a young age and encouraged to write it at a young age as well (some time in junior high, by a newly minted teacher named Dodie Wilson) because it changed my life.

Not in any dramatic way, mind you. It just gave me a new way not of looking at the world, but of describing what I saw. As Emerson said, "Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words," and for someone like me, who tends to write long and purple in my fiction, it's a good exercise to write short and tight. My poems tend to be no longer than a page, maybe forty lines, and if they're shorter, so much the better. I like my poetry succinct and pithy, like Gary Snyder's "Pine Tree Tops":

Pine Tree Tops
in the blue night
frost haze, the sky glows
with the moon
pine tree tops
bend snow-blue, fade
into sky, frost, starlight.
the creak of boots.
rabbit tracks, deer tracks,
what do we know.

What do we know. Not a question, but a statement, all inference and suggestion, metaphor and admonition, but no beating you over the head. Just a nudge with a sense of awe and wonder, the kind Lawrence Ferlinghetti is perpetually awaiting the rebirth and renaissance of.

(Side note: I was surprised and delighted the other night to hear that phrase—"a renaissance of wonder"—just slipped into some dialogue in a way that was slyly referential, probably thanks to Harlan Ellison, in the first season of Babylon Five, the entire arc of which I'm finally making my way through courtesy of Netflix. I love that kind of intelligent cross-pollination, especially when it creeps into a medium as stupid as TV can be.)

Mostly what I love about poetry is the challenge of its wordplay and craft, and the way it can use something completely mundane and common to illustrate or at least hint at something far more profound. I don't think anything illustrates the power of language quite the way poetry does, except, possibly, propaganda, against which poetry is an excellent antidote.

I love poetry for its slyness, its distillation of emotion and fact, its ability to shock, like a good photograph. I love its lineage, from the Greek poets through the Irish bards (who had such power to mock with their poetry that they could ruin a man's reputation) right down to slams and rap.

Here's my favorite Greek curse poem:

Liar
Archilochos

Swept overboard, unconscious in the breakers,
strangled with seaweed, may you wake up in a gelid
surf, your teeth, already cracked into the shingle,
now set rattling by the wind, while facedown,
helpless as a poisoned cur, on all fours you puke
brine reeking of dead fish. May those you meet,
barbarians as ugly as their souls are hateful,
treat you to the moldy wooden bread of slaves.
And may you, with your split teeth sunk in that,
smile, then, the way you did when speaking as my friend.

(From Dances for Flute and Thunder: Praises, Prayers, and Insults, Poems From the Ancient Greek translated by Brooks Haxton)

This has some real umph behind it and you can almost imagine the air turning black around the recipient, withering him.

Here's a less vicious Irish one on cheapness, by the ubiquitous Anon.:

I hear
he won't give horses for poems.
He gives what his style allows:
Cows.

(From The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, edited with Translations by Thomas Kinsella)

The thing about poetry is that it gets in your head and stays there. Or at least it does in mine. Once I start reading it, I begin to see it everywhere:

Rain on the weekend
Listen . . .
You can hear Monday laughing.

Nope, not a haiku but the caption of three panels of the cartoon Mutts. Here's a real haiku, by Yosa Buson, for comparison's sake:

I go,
you stay;
two autumns.

See what I mean? There's found poetry all over the place. When nonsense phrases started appearing in spam subject lines, I wasn't the only one who thought of collecting them and turning them into poetry. I even got a couple of serviceable haiku out of the New York edition of one of those magnetic poetry sets.

Touring New York City:
Broadway play, Saks, Soho, cab.
Expensive apple.

If you're interested, there are lots of places to hear poetry, learn about it, and read it aloud yourself. Here's a few:

1. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe
2. The Bowery Poetry Club
3. The Cornelia Street Cafe (great jazz too!)
4. St. Mark's Poetry Project
5. Poets House

And check here if you'd like to see a schedule of NYC readings. But pick a nice day. As Paul Auster says, "Poetry's a beautiful thing, but it's hardly worth freezing your ass off for."