Poetry for the poetry phobic: a case history
Many people have a hard time with poetry. I did. Someone may be able to read the most dense and difficult works of science or philosophy yet find it hard to enter the world of poetry: “Huh?” “This one doesn’t rhyme.” “The lines are so short! / long!” “I just can’t follow it.”
I want readers to feel at home in my work, so I will tell a bit about my own Before and After, hoping that my account of difficulty with poetry, then discovery, will help others move from the world of prose to the world of letting go in language.
As a child I read voraciously: safe, predictable sub-literature: comic books, and library books of my choosing, especially the ones in predictable series. The Freddy the Pig series ( Freddy Goes to the North Pole, etc; 26 of them). The biography series with orange covers (when orange was still ok) and the awkward title Childhoods of Famous Americans, (Molly Pitcher: Young Patriot). Nancy Drew, ever a new one. Formulas, banalities, were just fine. I liked fairy tales in which good and evil were unambiguous. The Land of Oz—many trips—was the limit of literary travel. The neighborhood librarian in those days was not an educator. No adult read the classics with me. When I was given a gift of Alice in a deluxe edition, I found her impenetrable and unappealing, and the Tenniel illustrations distressing.
I lacked the imagination to have imaginary friends and spent many hours alone perfecting my skills at mindless activities like jacks or pick-up sticks. I went on to major in analytic philosophy. The takeaway there was to be constantly vigilant about truth claims, to reject any string of words that wasn’t making a verifiable statement. In graduate school, I pretended, and strove valiantly, to study literature. But I was too limited in life experience and confidence to venture any distance from the clear and literal. I produced an effigy of a dissertation, the 178-page “Stylistic Study of the Old English Meters of Boethius.” It has been cited in bibliographies.
In the early 1970s, unemployed, wondering what would become of me, something new and transforming: compensatory education in photographic seeing. My husband, Eric, was one of photographer Minor White’s students in fine-art black and white photography. Minor inculcated an Eastern sensibility—sitting still and taking in. Letting the mind and senses go free-range. I hung around at Eric’s photo group meetings, where he and his friends practiced patient contemplation and receptivity as they viewed and discussed each other’s work. They cultivated the practice of experiencing photographs in the body. Grounding. These practices were also the foundation of making visual art, as they are for experiencing all artistic creation. Here were antidotes to my conditioning in shutting out feeling, leaping to conclusions, and attending only to the transactional in the life of the mind. Being around art photography so much, I was now thinking vaguely I might write about it. After all, I did have a fair amount of knowledge and sophistication, intuitive and acquired, about artistic form and esthetics, from the higher-learning years and from loving and playing classical music.
I signed up for a workshop at MIT on writing and photography. Right away, to my horror, I learned that the deal was not to write criticism but to produce artistic goods. Pictures—and poems. And panic! Despite what you might think about someone who had just claimed a doctorate writing about metrics, I felt about poetry the way many of us feel about cilantro: freeze or flee. What, me write a poem? The prospect of snapping a shutter—even letting Eric do the processing—was scary enough.
But I was in. Clearly, there was a lot of pent-up emotion, not with much positive vector, to set me going. I did the all-important work of throwing out caution and inhibition as I seized on subjects close at hand to photograph. As for poems, I crept miserably through the poetry section of the MIT bookstore . Was there anything I would find approachable to learn from? I stumbled on John Berryman’s Dream Songs (arresting but obnoxious) and on this early little poem by Frank O’Hara, friendly lines that spoke to my heart:
Autobiographia Literaria
When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.
I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.
If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out “I am
an orphan.”
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!
O’Hara was a vibrant presence in the New York art scene as poet and critic in the 1950s and 60s.He wrote voluminously, not caring so much about “doing anything” with his outpouring of poems. He died in an accident at 40. As his friend the poet Kenneth Koch noted about O’Hara’s genius, it lay in his naturalness: “Compared to him everyone else seemed a little self-conscious, abashed, or megalomaniacal.” I hope that my poems, too, strike readers as “natural.”
“Self Portrait,” the pair of images—photography and poem—on the back cover of my book, is a product of that MIT workshop. Here were the beginnings of my language, what I now think of as Poem Zero/0. Like many of my poems since, it is strongly centered in the voice of the self as the self looks for ways to understand the world it is in and how to be in it.
The above is an edited version of the talk I gave on November 17, 2019.