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Springtime and Poetry
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Published: May 3, 2009
I'll admit it: I don't read much poetry. I read a fair amount of nonfiction and the works of five or six mystery writers I admire. But poetry and I have largely avoided each other, which is a shame. I think that antipathy toward verse, rhyming or not, is true for most Americans.
Why this may be true, I have no idea. In Russia, poets are venerated as national treasures. They quote Pushkin at the drop of a ruble.
I have recently picked up, again, a book of poems I started reading seven years ago, and will be through its 433 pages of verse by the time you read this Sunday morning. Its clever title is "Good Poems," and they were selected by — and an introduction supplied by — one of my favorite authors, Garrsion Keillor. It was published by Penguin Books in 2002.
Keillor, "The Man from Lake Woebegone," is the person responsible for "The Prairie Home Companion" radio show on PBS. He has also written something like a dozen books, mostly short-story collections, but also some novels.
Why is poetry important? Keillor says, "What makes ... all good poems matter, is that they offer a truer account than what we're used to getting. They surprise us with clear pictures of the familiar."
I bought the book because Keillor's name was on it. He also published "The Pretty Good Joke Book," which I liked, so I thought, "What the heck, buy poem book."
Keillor's book has been patiently sitting on a shelf since then. I found a bookmark stuck between pages 24 and 25, so that's as far as I got back then. I don't know why I didn't continue reading it, but there it sat.
Maybe it's the recent weather that was responsible for my picking up the book again. Spring seems to have been more lovely this year than any in recent memory. The dogwoods and the azaleas have been striking and they have held onto their blossoms longer than usual. The ground under our dogwoods at our home now looks like it has snowed, but they held their blossoms a long time.
Getting back to the poetry, Keillor's poets are not, for the most part, those you read in school. There are some by poets to whom you should have been introduced, such as Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Robert Burns, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edna Saint Vincet Millay. There are even a few sonnets by the bard himself, Bill Shakespeare, and a few by my favorite author of antiquity, Anonymous.
But if you haven't read any poetry since senior high school English or Am. Lit. 101, most of Keillor's poets and their poems will be unknown to you.
The poems are mostly short, and are conveniently categorized thematically by Keillor into groups. A few of these are "A Good Life," "Elders," "Music," "Sons and Daughters," "Trips," "Lovers" and so on. You get the idea.
There was a time students were required to memorize poems. Once I could recite "If," by Rudyard Kipling, though I preferred his "Gunga Din," as it had some fine Cockney swearing in it.
I never deliberately set out to memorize "Casey at the Bat," or "The Highwayman," or "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," but I know parts of them and I remember how much I enjoyed listening to someone read them who could read them well, with pauses, and accents and feeling.
My mother read poems to my brother and me when we were young, the usual nursery rhyme stuff, and later read to us out of a book called, "101 Famous Poems." Fifty-some years later I remember "Abou Ben Adham," "Little Boy Blue," "Concord Hymn" and "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer.
When I was in the third or fourth grade, a well-intentioned old-maid schoolmarm made me memorize and recite "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," erroneously titled "Daffodils," by Mr. Wordsworth.
If there's one thing in the world a boy balanced precariously on the edge of adolescence does not want to memorize and recite, in front of his peers, it is a long poem about daffodils.
Miss Cora Freeze, the Grand Dame of the Mooresville Graded School System, Dowager Empress of Mooresville Junior High, probably ruined poetry for me, as she required my class to memorize "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant.
"Thanatopsis," for those of you who have forgotten your Greek, means "A Meditation on Death." Exactly not what healthy seventh-grade boys and girls were interested in.
Miss Cora was a Mooresville institution and taught for something like 40 years. She taught my father (not much), then me, and had she taught another few years, my son might have been in her class.
Now if we had memorized "The Charge of the Light Brigade," by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, or Robert W. Service's "The Cremation of Sam McGee," or "Little Orphan Annie," by James Whitcomb Riley, it would have been a different kettle of fish.
Thanks to Mr. Keillor, I have now been introduced to poets new to me and have found kindred spirits, people who have thought like I have thought, but have put their thoughts down on paper to be shared.
To be truthful, I did not care for all of the poems, but liked most of them. Emily Dickinson, that sly minx, still eludes me.
Poetry is a paradox. It is, at the same time, the simplest form of literature and the most complex. It is analogous to the game of chess: I can teach you to play chess in about 15 minutes, but to become good, really good at chess might take 15 years.
Keillor's book may have been just what I needed to adjust my thinking toward poetry, even though none of the poems I mentioned above that I would call "good poems" are in his anthology. But then, thank God, neither is "Thanatopsis" or the one about daffodils.
O.C. Stonestreet is a retired Iredell County history teacher and works in the newsroom at the R&L. He can be reached at ostonestreet@statesville.com.
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