Prose On Poetry #2

This is another essay on how I see poetry.

                                                       Prose About Poetry #2

           Ideally, a poem should speak to as many people as possible.  It may be about just one thing but it is often about something bigger, something more universal.  E.A. Houseman said, "I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat but he recognized the object by the symptoms in evokes.”  Similar things have been said of pornography as well.  If after reading a poem, you feel no symptoms, no wonder, no joy, no click of recognition, your relationship with the poem ends right there and it dies a quick, merciful death.  But, if something happens inside you, it's like a lovely warm fire that can be relit every time you read it.  You may feel compelled to tell others and that's how a poem lives on. Here is John Donne's "No Man Is An Island"

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
 
          John Donne tells me not to seek to learn "for whom the bell tolls".  Because "no man is an island", it tolls for me.  He wrote that in 1624, 400 years ago and it still dazzles me every time I read it and has since I first read it over 50 years ago.

         There may well be a poem that simply does its best to accurately describe something.  I think of these as sketches and they are some of the most lovely things to behold, but I’m talking here about a poem with somewhat larger scope.  I am taking nothing away from a poem that tries to create a sketch of a simply moving scene.  I often think of these sketch poems as place keepers or bookmarks.  As a poet, they often occur to me during times when I have nothing to say but I want to keep my engine running in case something happens and I need to jump in and take off.  When something does happen, a profound idea strolls by, I am ready to go.  Often the previous sketch poems prepared me by working through difficult images or any of the tricky things that can occur inside a densely packed thing like a poem.  It's a bit like a well designed camper.  Everything is touching everything else, interlinked even while still remaining disparate, but everything is necessary and has to work together.

          I often wonder why I became a poet.  It is certainly not anything I hoped to be when I was a young man.  Anyone who knew me up until the age of 55 would have had no idea.  I never discussed it in public.  Writing poetry was, for some reason, the method I came to use to understand things in life but I never wanted to talk about it.  It was a compulsion, not a passion.  Admitting you were a poet felt similar to saying you were a leper “but it’s not contagious”.  I kept it hidden from everyone but the most close.  I was a closet poet, very understandable if you work in carpentry. 

         Introspection was not a part of my childhood but poetry opened up something in me.  It allowed me to think about all those complex things like emotions and slowly sort them out on the page.  It was very similar to untying knots, which I was good at being a fisherman my entire childhood and never wanting to waste fishing line.
             I adored my mother all my life and still do, but I cannot remember one time growing up when she asked me a single personal question.  I thought nothing of it but I did think that the mothers of my friends, with their incessant questioning, were very odd.  My mother or father never said, “I love you” until much later in life, well after I had my own children.   My brothers and I thought nothing odd about that either and we felt well loved and cared for.
          I often run into people of my generation for whom this was their experience as well.  I think it was even more common for the generation before that.  Everyone was working hard all the time and there just wasn't time for a lot of these expressions nor introspection.  All this makes me think of the bit in Fiddler On The Roof where Tevye asks his wife Golde,  “Do you love me?" 
and she says;
“For twenty-five years I've washed your clothes,
cooked your meals, cleaned your house,
given you children, milked the cow”
           She basically says, “if that’s not love, what is?”  This sums up how I think my parents thought about us.  They loved poetry, loved singing, loved doing crossword puzzles, loved intellectual challenge.  They were immense readers every day of their lives.  They were sailors and they loved sailing but they didn't talk about sailing.  They certainly passed that down to their sons.   For some unknown reason, poetry became my method for solving life's riddles, asking questions and trying to make sense of it all.  If I can make an idea work, make a thought fit into a poem that has its own internal logic, then I can understand it.  I basically build snow globes with words.  And once some difficult concept is encased in there, I can walk away and put my mind to other things. Thus ends this essay.

 Ps. This is a poem about snow globes.
https://westonpparker.substack.com/p/when-the-snow-settles