Not Averse to Verse

I don’t read much new-ish (i.e. from the past couple decades or so) poetry anymore though I occasionally revisit some classics. My sister, not I, was the poet of the family as both reader and writer. (I posted a collection of hers on another blogsite.) Nonetheless, a discount at Hamilton Books prompted me to pick up 100 Poems That Matter, a collection from Poets.org with an intro by Richard Blanco (poet at Obama’s second inaugural). More than half the contents are new or new or new-ish, with the remainder by Yeats, Plath, Cummings, and other familiar names. I probably never would have encountered, much less read, any of the new-ish ones in any context other than a collection such as this.

Poetry simply isn’t as prominent in the culture as it once was. To be sure, there is a vast quantity being written, but it is mostly read in isolated (often academic) niches. Once upon a time, poets were rock stars. Tennyson, Eliot, Kipling, Coleridge, Browning, Whitman, and their like were famous in their own lifetimes, and not just in Academia. Common folk knew who they were. W.B. Yeats was so lionized by the Irish in the 1920s that they made him a Senator despite that little pagan quirk. (Could an openly pagan candidate be elected Senator in the US today? Maybe, but I doubt it.) All this has changed. The last time contemporary poetry has had a broad cultural (or countercultural) impact was the oft-parodied Beat era. Who was the last U.S. Poet Laureate selected by the Library of Congress whose name a majority of Americans would recognize? Or even a largish minority? I’d venture it was Robert Frost, and that was more than 60 years ago. The current Poet Laureate, by the way, is Ada Limón.
 
That poetry isn’t as commonly read anymore, however, doesn’t mean some isn’t worth reading. This collection has 100 that purportedly matter. Not all matter a lot. Actually, some (IMO) are pretentious tripe. (Moralistic and social posturings aren’t any more appealing in verse than in prose.) The large majority, though, do have at least something less facile to say.
 
What do they say? Well, your mileage may vary. Blanco in the intro makes the point that "we needn't read poetry with the apprehension that we're only supposed to get what we think the poet wants us to get" but rather that "poetry, like music, relates to subjective experiences, and we should feel free to respond to them subjectively." So, too.
 
I’m glad he said “like music,” since lyrics, though clearly closely related to poetry and fuzzy at the boundary, are not quite the same thing. The simple distinction, of course, is that lyrics are sung (or are meant to be) and are (usually) accompanied by instruments while poetry (usually) is not. Carol King’s verses are something different from those of Edgar Allan Poe. This is why Bob Dylan when he won a Nobel Prize in Literature told the committee that it had made a mistake, though he took the prize money: “But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days.”
 
Bob writes some pretty good lyrics. However, if, like myself, you’ve let much time pass since experiencing verse that was meant to be “read on a page” (or perhaps recited), there are worse places to restart than this collection.
 

A classic Steve Allen bit: reading lyrics as poetry

 

Gene Vincent & The Blue Caps - Be Bop A Lula (1956)