Among recent thrills has been the popularity of poems as a conversation topic.
I spend most of my waking hours stalking what to talk about tomorrow. Horrific headlines command attention, but howling gets old in a hurry, and I’ve little news to add to the general groan. The periodical pundits I depend on know something I don’t. I’m a credentialed expert about nothing except myself.
Neither am I a comic (I hope) with a schtick to dispel your dismay. My jokes are mostly puns and (my family assures me) seldom funny.
I write to brighten your day and mine with amiable talk, the rarest of treats in this rat-a-tat epoch. Who has time to schmooze! Schmooze (or snooze) and you lose! When I see a young family at a restaurant table, each engrossed by their stupid-phone, my heart aches, that they will never know the delights of social intercourse, equal if not superior to sexual.
My first missive about a poem, other than my annual Christmas offering, was a busman’s holiday, why not give it a fling. It seemed to please, so I flung another. Friends thanked me for recalling favorites or, even sweeter, introducing them to unfamiliar voices. The mystery of a poem’s appeal supplied ample grist for our six-hundred-word strolls and a welcome diversion from the Nameless One.
Until this chance discovery I thought I was the only person I knew who liked poems. If patterns persist, today’s words will be read by at least ten times as many folks as purchase a best-selling book of poems. Why the disconnect? What makes poetry so popular and unpopular at the same time?
Books is my hunch. A lyric poem was never meant to be locked in a book. It’s a kiss, a sunset, a sob, the matter of an instant. Who wants to read a book of kisses?
Books are a commitment. Buy one and you’ve got to at least try to read it. I’ve hundreds of books of poems but scarcely a one have I read through. I visit. Sometimes, after decades, I’ll have perused a beloved cover-to-cover, but that’s infrequent.
What’s called modern poetry, serious verse produced from the twentieth century on, slit its own throat by making itself too difficult for casual enjoyment. I’d sooner read a tweet from the Nameless One than a canto by Ezra Pound – and I enjoy a poetic grapple. Poems we can’t fathom frustrate like nuts we can’t crack – to hell with them.
The Internet is an incessant explosion of seductive instants. Allergic to length or sobriety, it snatches at us like peddlers in a souk. The emoji is its mascot. A poem one can enjoy in minutes suits its tempo and attention span. So (it seems) do our daily jaunts, the lexical equivalent of a kiss or sob.
Recall this knife-wound you may not have read since college:
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedShe dwelt among the untrodden waysBeside the springs of Dove,A Maid whom there were none to praiseAnd very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stoneHalf hidden from the eye!—Fair as a star, when only oneIs shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could knowWhen Lucy ceased to be;But she is in her grave, and, oh,The difference to me!
Have you ever felt as sad for anyone as you do for young Wordsworth? Has any early love trembled more vividly? How in seventy-one homespun words did the poet accomplish this miracle? What might its force teach us about beauty, truth, love?
Such is the genius of the poem.