Very recently, I’ve begun to badger my friends about reading poetry. In the middle of a conversation, I will ask at some point if they’ve ever read Philip Larkin.
I feel like I deserve the puzzled looks I get in response.
I’m not sure why flinging that dead medium in other people’s faces has become a preoccupation of mine. I haven’t picked that habit up from anywhere I can remember.
My biggest fear is being a bore, and every time I bring up poetry I can feel my words, en route to the listener's ears, becoming imbued with boredom, increasing in weight and torpor mid-flight and finally dropping out of the air and landing dully on the floor.
But I can’t stop. There’s too much truth in some of these poems to let them squat there in your head, without acknowledgment. The words of those dead men and women demand to be spoken out loud. (Poetry is firstly a verbal form.)
If it sounds morbid, that’s because it is. The poets we remember, from Homer to Matthew Dickman, had immortality in mind from the beginning. They want to live through their poems as ghosts in the heads of other people.
Even Whitman knew that his words would echo and rebound through future generations. In his audacity to recognize his own genius, he must have known that his many reprints of Leaves of Grass would gain him disciples. (“You shall not look through my eyes, nor take things from me …” Yeah. Whatever you say, man.)
But the reason for my recent fascination might have more to do with poetry as a form of connection. Poetry is fluid. It allows for a drawing together of many things; relationships between subject and object come quickly and simply. It does not require continuity, like prose, although it rewards some degree of repetition.
It does not demand abstraction or definition, even though there is room for both. It allows for lines like, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked/ dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.” This passage, from “Howl,” encompasses the fast verse, maniac screeds and concentrated, concrete madness that only poems can touch.
It also allows for more a more somber, indefinite repetition, like this excerpt written by W.B. Yeats:
And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love’s bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all disheveled wandering stars.
These are words that connect concept to concept. They don’t require extraneous dialogue, setting or exposition. And because the best poetry is immediate, beautiful and self-contained, it doesn’t need to be explained.
This is why talking about good poetry is useless. The poem itself is the explanation.