I grew up on poetry. My mother read poems aloud to me at bedtime from a worn and well loved paperback collection of poems for children. Among my favorites were the Sugarplum Tree and the Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat. The anthology included many old favorites my mother had learned growing up, such as the Land of Counterpane and The Swing by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Also included in my poetry diet were the books by A.A. Milne - - When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. My sisters and I were so familiar with those rhymes that we could recite many of them by heart, notably a poem called Disobedience.
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
"Mother," he said, said he;
"You must never go down to the end of the town, if
you don't go down with me."
It wasn’t until the fourth grade that I learned that not all poems rhymed. I was stunned. In our Language Arts class we learned the mechanics of writing something called a cinquain. Syllabically speaking, it’s 2,4,6,8,2. This was an entirely new experience. I immediately wrote one that earned me praise from the teacher and probably more concern than I knew.
Loneliness
Is there
In that black gloom
Not speaking, not listening
Til I could cry out with sadness
I weep
The point of all this is that poetry was everywhere when I was growing up, both at home and at school. I was raised to believe it was an integral part of life. As I grew, there always seemed to be a new kind of poetry to grow into. I was deeply committed to ee cummings for a number of years. His anti-traditional way of putting words together appealed to my growing rebelliousness as a teenager.
I wrote many, many poems during those years which took their inspiration from cummings. I wasn’t trying to create Great Art. I was attempting to express myself in a way that only poetry allowed.
We studied poetry in high school and in college but the kind of analysis we were required to perform took a lot of the fun out of it for me. This was not poetry for self-nourishment and joy. It was dissection, classification, intellectual judgement. English teachers had apparently been brought into the world in order to get poetry down on the ground and break its arm. And possibly extract its soul.
Poetry says, “let me breathe into these words the
essence of my being.” English class says, “let us take notes and pass the test.”
Still, I continued to write poetry - - independent of all that - - probably into my mid-twenties. Then I got a full-time job, got married, had children. Little by little the poetic voice in me diminished and went silent. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately because of Howard County’s search for a Poet Laureate.
What kind of people keep their poetic voice alive well into adulthood? It must be a miraculous thing, an heroic act of beating the odds.
As you might expect, it was reading a poem yesterday that inspired me to write today’s post.
there's laundry to do and a genocide to stop
there's laundry to do and a genocide to stop. I have to
eat better and also avoid a plague. my rent went up
$150. I'll need to pick up more shifts. Twenty people died
in Rafah this morning and every major news outlet is
stretching the limits of passive voice to suggest whole
families may have leaped up through the air at missiles
that otherwise had the right of way. I just got a
notification that my student loan payments are starting
up again and my phone isn't charged. My cousin got
COVID for a fourth time and can no longer work or walk
or even feed himself. The person across from me on the
L train seems to fashion themself a punk rock
revolutionary, but they're not wearing a face mask, and
that's the kind of cognitive dissonance that makes me
want to steal batteries. Fascists keep winning primaries
for both parties, and I think I gained a few pounds. The
CDC just announced there are no more speed limits on
highways, and I think this Ativan is finally hitting. The
NYPD farmer's market only sells bad apples, have you
heard that one? Listen it's warm today, too warm for
March. But I don't have time to think through the
implications because there's laundry to do and a
genocide to stop.
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