What good amid these, O me, O life?
That's the question Big Uncle Walt puts to us in a short poem he wrote in the early 1880's. What is good in a world of faithlessness, foolishness, vanity, and struggle? What is beautiful or worthwhile among the seemingly empty and useless years? His answer:
So, I started this blog. Not just to contribute my verse, but to post poems that I like, to talk about why poetry is important, and to generally frolic around in my own nerdiness. Won't you please join me?
I imagine what will emerge will be an almagam of my own poems, my thoughts about poetry, poems from guys (and gals) like Whitman there, and maybe some song lyrics or other poeticalish type things that float across my mind. It may turn out to be an outline of the type of poetry class I would teach...if I taught poetry...
...like the great Billy Collins! He teaches poetry! And he was the poet laureate! So I open with his "Introduction to Poetry":
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with a rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Stay tuned. There's more to come.
That you are here - that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
So, I started this blog. Not just to contribute my verse, but to post poems that I like, to talk about why poetry is important, and to generally frolic around in my own nerdiness. Won't you please join me?
I imagine what will emerge will be an almagam of my own poems, my thoughts about poetry, poems from guys (and gals) like Whitman there, and maybe some song lyrics or other poeticalish type things that float across my mind. It may turn out to be an outline of the type of poetry class I would teach...if I taught poetry...
...like the great Billy Collins! He teaches poetry! And he was the poet laureate! So I open with his "Introduction to Poetry":
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with a rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Stay tuned. There's more to come.
posted by Susanna | 6:50 PM
3 Comments:
Fantastic poem. No graphing the poem's quality there!
Do you ever listen to The Writer's Almanac? I love that 5 minutes with Garrison Keillor each day; partly because of connecting with the great stream of writing and history, and partly (of course) because of the daily poems. Listening to him read them each morning has gotten me into the habit of reading poems aloud. I feel it differently when I hear it and pay attention better when I'm saying it.
Looking forward to more. Viva la nerdiness.
What a fabulous poem! :-D
I used to read and love poetry much, but alas I have fallen into the dolldrums of my life where I rarely touch the stuff. I am glad to have someone as wise as you to lead me back in. :-D
I love this poem! I used it the second day of school with my gifted class. I cut the "poetry unit" and we're just going to read poetry all semester. This poem was the first one. It has a lot of excellent sensory details, great imagery (I love the waterskiing, the hose beating), and it's funny. When we discussed it, I got even more out of it. I even wondered, the first time I read it, if teachers torture confessions out of poems, and maybe that's why a lot of people think they don't like poetry. Another thing we discussed was whether a confession extracted under torture is reliable. Anyway, it was a lot of fun to talk about poetry again.
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