A friend asked me how important a part poetry plays in my life. I replied seriously that I could not imagine being without the unusual beauty and clarity the best poetry brings into my life.
A day is dulled and dimmed if it passes and I do not pick up a book of poems in my library, browse in some anthology, find a new poem in the latest issue of Poetry Review or some other magazine or at least before my eyes shut in sleep glance at some old favourite lines from Walcott, Hopkins, Yeats, Carter or a score of other supreme masters of the art and craft of making poems.
In most peoples’ lives I find that poetry is absent. Of course I do not blame or condemn them, especially as many of them live better, more considerate, more caring and more constructive lives than I do. But I do not understand how they can live without the blessing and benefit of poetry.
05How sad, I think, that he or she may never have read, and may never read, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s great and terrible sonnets or Yeats’s ‘Among School Children’ (which I once heard Martin Carter call the best poem ever written) or Derek Walcott’s astonishing autobiographical poem ‘Another Life’ or the agonizing lines about the death of his wife by Robinson Jeffers in his poem ‘Hungerfield’ or any one of a thousand other masterpieces.
Mind you, I also think how sad that I in my turn will never read the countless other thousands of masterpieces which life is a thousandfold too short to find and treasure. This is, by the way, one more reason why I can never understand the view that one full lifetime of 70 to 80 years is about right for any human being. No, that is not nearly enough for all there is to savour.
Let me share three poems I have recently read or re-read. The first is by the American Robert Pinsky whose marvellous short book The Sounds of Poetry anyone interested in the music in poems should read.
Samurai Song
When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.
When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.
When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had no
Mother I embraced order.
When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.
When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.
When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.
Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.
The second poem is by another American poet, Ellen Bass, whom I have just discovered. Her subject is an interesting one and I have debated the possibilities with friends in the past – but never thought of coming back in the form the poet suggests.
Reincarnation
Who would believe in reincarnation
if she thought she would return as
an oyster? Eagles and wolves
are popular. Even domesticated cats
have their appeal. It’s not terribly distressing
to imagine being Missy, nibbling
kibble and lounging on the windowsill.
But I doubt the toothsome oyster has ever
been the totem of any shaman
fanning the Motherpeace Tarot
or smudging with sage.
Yet perhaps we could do worse
than aspire to be a plump bivalve. Humbly,
the oyster persists in filtering
seawater and fashioning the daily
irritations into lustre.
Dash a dot of Tabasco, pair it
with a dry Martini, not only
will this tender button inspire
an erotic fire in tuxedoed men
and women whose shoulders gleam
in candlelight, this hermit praying
in its rocky cave, this anchorite of iron,
calcium, and protein, is practically
a molluskan saint. Revered and sacrificed,
body and salty liquor of the soul,
the oyster is devoured, surrendering
all – again and again – for love.
The third poem is by Kenneth Koch. The poem appeals to me, makes me think of when I was in the pomp and ambition of youth and saw no reason why every achievement and every pleasure should be out of reach!
You Want a Social Life, With Friends
You want a social life, with friends,
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day? What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.
There isn’t time enough, my friends –
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends –
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?
Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.
I could go on putting these poems down, overflowing on to other pages, crowding out the horrors of IS and Boko Haram, the swelling tide of world-wide selfishness and consequential inequality – and on the local scene the wearisome but necessary turmoil and vitriolic exchanges of “the campaign” leading to the election.
But I do not think my editor would indulge me. I have no illusion that for every reader who takes the time to read these poems and perhaps finds some delight or revelation in them, there will be a score or a hundred who, seeing the stanza form on the page, will almost instinctively turn elsewhere. Poetry is a passion I am glad I acquired young but it is not a passion that many share.
