"For poetry makes nothing happen"
If you want to make your Twitter experience better, I highly recommend following a bunch of poets. This will not, sadly, make the news any less awful. Even if poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,”[1] “poetry makes nothing happen.”[2] It will also not make The Discourse of the Day any less “full of sound and fury/ Signifying nothing.”[3] It will, however, break up these things with occasional bits of wonder and beauty and power, as poets, I have noticed, are quite likely to regularly post poetry.
A couple of weeks ago, a few words from a poem crossed my feed. A teacher, talking about how their students would get to experience the words “and gash gold-vermillion” in class that day. I don’t follow the person who said it, and can’t for the life of me find the tweet now, but in my memory, that person was excited for their students. And what sort of a person who loves words enough to teach them to other people wouldn’t be? It is the closing phrase of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ wonderfully gorgeous sonnet, “The Windhover.”
“The Windhover” is a word-drunk poem from a word-drunk poet. Truly, for me, there are few if any poets who seem to consciously revel in what they can do with the sound of words in their poetry as much as Hopkins does. It is one of the things I love most about his work, one of the things I go to him for. And here, in this particular poem – there are entire raptures to be written on the skill of the rhyme, both internal and end. The consonance and alliteration. The rhythm and meter as we are hurled on the same currents as the titular falcon. I could be academic about it, but really, the poem doesn’t need me. Just read it. Read it aloud, and revel in the sound of it. “Ah my dear,” indeed.
I love poetry, and one of the reasons that I love it, is that for me, it is a form that deeply engages with the power of the word as word on the page. Poetry seems to me more likely than prose to think of how something sounds, and how something looks on the page, to consider how much weight and meaning and symbolism can be put in each particular word and then to take advantage of all those things at once. To do so much in so few syllables, and to expect the reader to keep up – to read with the same eye to stretch and flexibility. To listen with the same ear to the way sound supports meaning, supports the experience of the thing.
One of the best things I do for myself is to read poetry regularly. Doing so feels like a balm for my brain – a way to focus and indulge at the same time. I love the excuse to pause and think deeply about language.
It also turns out that that pause and deep thinking is one of the better things I can do for myself as a writer as well. I’ve found that one of the things that always seems to help when I feel blocked or stale in my own work is to read a few poems. It works as a kind of reset: Ah, yes. This is what words can do. This is why you love them. Now take that love and make something new with it.
Perhaps this seems obvious, since they are different forms, but it is possible to do things in poetry that are not possible in prose. At the same time, poetry reminds me of the possibilities that can be brought to prose writing. Steeping myself in poetry becomes an encouragement to be a little more precise, or a little more obscure. To write stranger.
It is much easier for me to pick up my pen, then, “My heart in hiding/ Stirred”. Perhaps at the end, that’s all I want. Something that stirs my hiding heart, and stirs it out of hiding. To make the blue-bleak embers gash gold-vermillion.
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Here are a few favorites that are easily available online, if you are looking to add some poetry to your day:
“Spring and Fall” - Gerard Manley Hopkins
“Postscript” - Seamus Heaney (here is a link to Heaney reading this poem)
“The Bee Meeting” - Sylvia Plath
“Dead Stars” – Ada Limón
“Litany” – Rebecca Lindenberg
“Love at First Sight” - Wislawa Szymborska
“They Flee From Me” - Thomas Wyatt
[1] Percy Shelley, in his essay, “A Defence of Poetry.”
[2] “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” by W. H. Auden
[3] William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 5.5.72-28.