Poetry? Nah!

Well, Billy Collins might be right—Walt Whitman was nothing if not a great self-promoter. But who knew that he invented pseudonyms and then wrote surprisingly positive reviews of his own work? Great idea—I may take it up….

And Collins is right, too, about the poetry being a verbal bear hug. Consider this, randomly drawn from the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass:

I do not know whether many, passing by, will dis-

         cover you, or inhale your faint odor—but I

         believe a few will;

O slender leaves! O blossoms of my blood! I permit

         you to tell, in your own way, of the heart that is

         under you,

O burning and throbbing—surely all will one day be

         accomplished;

O I do not know what you mean, there underneath

         yourselves—you are not happiness,

You are often more bitter than I can bear—you burn

         and sting me,

“Enough,” you want to cry. Or maybe—here’s a thought—join in? Right, here goes:

O ever stretching, ever-churning Atlantic, your waters seething with the salt and the foam and the violence of wave;

O ever-stirring prairie, your gold poured out on the ribbon of the earth, the wheat, the oats, the soybeans waving gently in the humid night air;

O Poet’s Passage, the quiet Stephan murmuring to his charge, Lucia stroking the coffee that has been freed from the bean, the hapless writer deep in his toil;

All you do I love, all you do I seek, generations of teachers, and writers, and baristas to come, to all you who come,

From Maine to Missouri, from Wisconsin to Wyoming, from the plains of Kansas to the fruited slopes of California, you, all you,

Do I love!

OK—that’s mean. That’s unfair. But why is it that so much poetry—wrote peotry, but it got corrected (and is now red-squiggled), dammit—just leaves me cold? Why do I distrust it so much? And especially stuff that everyone else gets—why am I so immune?

Let’s take a favorite of my mother’s—Walter de la Mare, or not. Since it’s an unknown world to me, why not fall flat on my face and write one?

To A Poem

You’re in there, I know,

Dammit, clutching a wire in the

Hard drive,

Lurking under the keyboard

Flitting fleetfoottedly from the number

Pad to the keyboard to

The screen.

You glare out,

Sticking your tongue on

Which letters glisten

Out at me.

Letters that circle and spin,

Drop up and rise down

And will not form

A simple sort of word.

You tease me, you poem that

Drank coffee with me in the morning

Made my bed, dusted the

Fireplace…

And then…

Took the suitcase from the closet shelf,

Brushed off the cat hair,

Packed a dictionary and thesaurus

And walked out of my life, forever…..