ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 31, 1997 TAG: 9703310125
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Monty S. Leitch
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
IN ADDITION to being April Fool's Day, tomorrow marks the first day of National Poetry Month.
There may be some connection.
I mean that: (1) In the minds of the general public, poetry is a foolish pursuit; and (2) also in the minds of the general public, those who would celebrate poetry are often thought to be fools themselves.
I do not subscribe to these opinions. (Perhaps I am a fool.) Instead, I find in poetry great beauty and surcease. Our world would be a much lesser place without it.
Consider, for instance, a world without songs. No lullabies. No hymns. No blues, no rock, no rap. Perhaps you could do without one of those song forms, but not all. And I don't see how we could do away with one, without doing away with all.
All of them, poems.
Or, imagine a world without the Book of Psalms, the Song of Solomon, or most of the favorite passages of Isaiah; without the Bhagavad Gita or the Tao Te Ching; without Shakespeare, Basho, Walt Whitman, Willie Nelson, Anne Bradstreet or Mother Goose.
Imagine the world without chants, limericks, skip-rope rhymes, or jingles.
What a dull world it would be!
Last week, at Roanoke College, our U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass talked about - among other things - the importance of poetry; the importance of taking possession of our history by taking possession of, and celebrating, our many different poetries. The poetry of the Pilgrims, the Quakers, the displaced aristocrats, and the wild Scots-Irish; of the forcefully displaced Africans and Native Americans; of the East European Jews, Latinos and Asians who've come to make up our current cultures. By embracing their poetries, he suggested, we embrace their cultures; and by embracing their cultures, we embrace their humanity. Quoting poet Gary Snyder, he reminded us that "poetry is very high-class information." Poetry is more than words can say.
My first serious aspiration was poetry. Throughout high school, I wrote poems. I typed them neatly, and bound them into a carefully hand-decorated notebook. I have that notebook still.
Even though the poems are miserable. Childish, bathetic, nonsensical. In short, completely adolescent. Nevertheless, they are desperately important to me as emotional touchstones lining the early stretch of the path of my life; and I suspect I'm not the only 40-something citizen who still cherishes a clutch of adolescent creations. As I said, poetry is more than words can say, and adolescents brim with the unsayable. What would we have done without our poetry?
I also cherish a collection of exquisite poems, by real poets, because these poems, too, are touchstones - these, lining more recent stretches of my path. I return to them often for the reminders they give me of lessons learned: Tennyson's "Ulysses," Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts," Shakespeare's sonnets 29 and 116, Elizabeth Barret Browning's sonnet 43. Certain poems by Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich and Richard Wilbur; by e.e. cummings, A.E. Housman and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
I like a poem to do what Emily Dickinson said a poem should do: Take the top of my head off. These I've collected take the top of my head off.
There are poems that will take the top of your head off, too, but they will most likely be different poems. For poems reach so deep into the soul that they touch that which is unique in each of us. Once there, they say more than words can say. The poem that takes the top of your head off says to you what you need to hear.
And then it says more.
In celebration of National Poetry Month, why not take the time to go back to a poem that you love? Read it again. Relish it again. And then, look around for another. And another. If you've never read poetry before and don't know where to start, start with one of my favorites. It may become one of your favorites, too.
And, despite the date, don't worry about foolishness. The only fools this month will be those who persist in their resistance to poems.
MONTY S. LEITCH is a Roanoke Times columnist.
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