Posts Tagged poetry

Water & Stone I (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

I continue the process of typing up poems on my Smith-Corona Super-Speed and putting them into a notebook I am creating.

This small poem is called “Small Pleasures.”

Enjoy!

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I am not a verbal person. I am a writer. I was born with a birth defect to my ears. Once discovered, when I was 2 or 3, doctors were able to correct most of my hearing with a series of operations over a number of years. Operations eventually fixed most of the hearing problem… but it took 7-8 years of speech therapy to teach my tongue to pronounce words in a way that others could understand.

To this day, I need to “practice” words and names I have never tried to say before. I prefer to see things written and to write. And I avoid saying certain words altogether. I have one vocabulary I use for speaking and another for writing.

In the West of my youth, my slow speaking pace and peculiar verbal style that occasionally includes a mild stutter, frequent “re-starts,” and a number of hesitation-pauses did not seem particularly pronounced. Westerners have been known to be slow talkers.

But when I headed to college in the Midwest and seminary in Chicago, it was noticed. One professor even told me that at first the faculty had thought that I must have had a substance abuse problem at one time. He said they thought that was the case until they started reading what I wrote.

I communicate one way in writing and one way in speaking. They are remarkably different. And hence, I often feel like the Apostle Paul,  “His letters are weighty and strong, but… his speech of no account.”

Ours is a verbal world. Politicians are measured quite often not by what do as much as what they say. Verbal awkwardness is often construed to be a sign of intellectual deficiency. George Bush, the younger, was often proclaimed by his critics to be an “idiot” because of his well known habit of mangling American English. That he had graduated from an Ivy league school and had an MBA from Harvard and had risen to become the most powerful man in the world, was totally dismissed. Because George Bush would sound occasionally like someone not fully acquainted with the English language, many came to believe that he must be a fool.

To quote the Scarecrow in Wizard of Oz, it is has long been my observation that, “some people without brains do an awful lot of talking don’t they?” In fact, the more eloquent and polished a speaker seems, the less likely I am to trust the words that they are saying: used car salesmen, talk radio hosts, lobbyists, politicians….

Truth and eloquence are not the same thing. In fact, quite often truth is an ugly and confusing thing. Politicians talk-radio hosts, NRA mouth-pieces, abortion-rights advocates, and Fox News anchors make their living “prettying-up” things… using language to obfuscate and confuse. Those who get their news only from radio and television soundbites are quickly led astray. Images and eloquence rule the day.

But when we teach children to read literature, poetry and fiction and drama, we teach them the truth about Truth (with a capital “T”). Truth can sometimes be messy and ugly and difficult and demanding. But in the end, Truth alone matters… not power or advantage or money or winning or looking good. Literature alone teaches us that.

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Junco River

Here in the North Country early winter has arrived. A cold day of grey rain and big white flakes of snow that melted as soon as they hit the ground reminded us of what the next months will bring.

At lunch, I went walking along the river. Last time I had walked that same stretch of river the trees had not yet fully turned. Today they were bare and wet and the only birds I saw were a few crows that sat high on an old cottonwood… heedless of the wet, cold day.

Winter in the North Country brings a different kind of beauty… leads to a different kind of wonder.

I am planning to spend the winter months reading Thoreau… and reporting back to MontanaWriter some of what I am reading.

Reading Thoreau is rich diggings. There is so much to be mined from what he has written… and there is much to be mindful of.

Today’s quotes concern two things that I consider to be two of the most interesting things in the world: rivers and poetry.

Enjoy!

A few quotes from Thoreau’s Journals

 

RIVERS
For the first time it occurred to me this afternoon what a piece of wonder a river is,— a huge volume of matter ceaselessly rolling through the fields and meadows of this substantial earth, making haste from the high places, by stable dwellings of men and Egyptian Pyramids, to its restless reservoir. One would think that, by a very natural impulse, the dwellers upon the headwaters of the Mississippi and Amazon would follow in the trail of their waters to see the end of the matter. [Thoreau, Henry David; Searls, Damion (2011-11-16). The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861 (New York Review Books Classics) (p. 7). Random House Inc Clients. Kindle Edition.]

 

POETRY
No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself.  [Thoreau, Henry David; Searls, Damion (2011-11-16). The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861 (New York Review Books Classics) (p. 9). Random House Inc Clients. Kindle Edition.]

The best poetry has never been written, for when it might have been, the poet forgot it, and when it was too late remembered it; or when it might have been, the poet remembered it, and when it was too late forgot it.  [Thoreau, Henry David; Searls, Damion (2011-11-16). The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861 (New York Review Books Classics) (p. 10). Random House Inc Clients. Kindle Edition.]

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Autumn Fowl (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

Autumn has come to the North Country. The ash trees in the front of my house have lost most of their leaves. The locust in back is still mainly green but it is always one of the last trees to lose its small leaves.

Yesterday at lunch I walked along the wetlands that border the river. In one pond there were flocks of blue-winged teals and coots in another pelicans. In one of the more distant ponds there were a few trumpeter swans. A serious bird watcher was kind enough to let me look at the swans for a while through his big spotting scope. I have always found bird watchers to be generous with both their knowledge and their equipment.

When my daughters were young, we used to go bird watching often along the river. Morgan, my youngest, was especially good at spotting birds: owls, swans, indigo buntings, orioles and red starts, ducks of various kinds. She was also good at identification and classification. Much better than I ever was.

I have a birder’s journal that I have I have kept on and off since the Spring of 2004, when Morgan was 9. As bird journals goes, it is a modest thing. There are few birds a real birder would be proud of: a scarlet tanager, a lazuli bunting.

Flipping through the journal now, reading the places and dates, I realize that the birds I love best and remember most fondly are those I saw with Morgan: a barred owl that she  spotted just above the trail at a local creek, juncos that she and I used to watch sitting in rocking chairs at a local nature center, indigo buntings singing along the Bloomington Ferry trail, and a belted kingfisher we spotted along a pond at the end of a day.

The little girl that used to go bird watching and hiking with me is now grown up. A senior in high school, she will soon be moving on to college and young adulthood. That is the way of nature… like changing leaves and blue-winged teals gathering to head south.

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Sumac Red

From time to time I come across an article about “the writing life.” Occasionally I will even read one, or parts at least. When I do, I seldom recognize much that is familiar from my own writing life. I am hoping that a slight adjustment in my second-job work schedule may help with that.

Writing takes time… as does reading… as does most things in life that matter.

When you are in your 20s, you are by nature impatient yet still able to take time and health and life itself for granted. When you are in your 50s, and have been paying attention to the things you should have been paying attention to, you may have finally learned at least a little patience. Yet, irony of irony, at half a century you now realize that you can no longer take anything for granted.

In the past few months I have been feeling an urgency about many things that I have been putting off for awhile… some for months, some for years, some for decades. Things I have been assuming I would finally get to “later… when I have the time and money.”

Autumn is the perfect time for such thoughts. As trees drop their leaves, we think of the dross and drivel of our own lives… the things that once seemed so important but now can be easily let go.

I find myself making mental lists. One is of all the things I have wanted to do but have not yet done. Some of the things on that list have been there for 40 years, some have been added and altered over time, and many things that would have once been there are long deleted. Time distills dreams.

The other list I make is of things I am ready to let go.

The cottonwood behind my house is mostly bare now. The locust and ash trees are just beginning to show signs of color around their edges. Driving out of my neighborhood, greens and yellows seem to mix equally with the cool blue of the late September sky. It is autumn in the North Country.

AUTUMN, by Amy Lowell

All day I have watched the purple vine leaves

Fall into the water.

And now in the moonlight they still fall,

But each leaf is fringed with silver.

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One of the most remarkable things about blogging remains the number of strangers that email me that they have read something I have posted and like it. I assume that there are many who do not like what they read here, but they do not bother to write.

My blog statistics tell me that the number of people coming to  MontanaWriter continues to grow. In the month of March, there were almost 12,000 unique visitors from all over the world. By blog standards, that is a modest number. But since MontanaWriter began two years ago with zero readers, I remain amazed.

One of the other things my blog statistics tell me is that the search term that brings the most people to MontanaWriter is one for John Wayne. The numbers are not even close. On a blog that is mostly about poetry, that has many more references to W.B. Yeats and lyric poetry than to movies, it is curious that so much traffic comes from The Duke.

It is not surprising, though. More than 30 years after his death, John Wayne remains the definitive movie star: iconic and bigger than life. For many he is also symbolic of something vital that it “feels” like we have lost.

What that thing that we have lost is is difficult to define.  It is also difficult to know if it really ever existed at all, or is merely something we wish once existed: some golden era of shared values and understanding that made us all better. Either way John Wayne the actor, the icon, represents something more than just movies or Hollywood or acting technique.

I have loved John Wayne movies all my life. Growing up when and where I did it was natural to love westerns. And if you love westerns, it is inevitable that you will love John Wayne movies because most of the best westerns ever made starred The Duke. There are a handful that star other actors, but they are just that: a handful.

I have always felt more than a bit sorry for those who say they do not like westerns. It is the same way I feel when someone says they do not like baseball (or basketball or football), or reading, or jazz, or poetry, or bourbon, or country music. It is unfathomable to me that someone can live without those things that seem to me so essential to life.

I hope that those who stumble upon MontanaWriter while looking for articles on The Duke are not greatly disappointed to find poetry reviews here, or articles about baseball, or theological comments. I also hope that those who came here for a review of a poem by William Morris or William Blake are not disappointed to find articles about westerns and John Wayne here. For me, all these things seem inseparable, naturally related: Yeats read dime westerns, John Ford read Yeats, theology of culture is all inclusive.

The blogosphere is about interconnectivity… not just of people but also of ideas. In the end, I think it is this “new community” of ideas that is the web’s greatest promise. Poetry, John Wayne, and jazz can inhabit a place together on the web that they could never have in the old, pre-digital age. In fact, in 2012, poetry, John Wayne and jazz seem inextricably mixed, pilgrim.

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The feature Hugh’s Journals appears here each Sunday. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

Hugh’s notebooks have a number of poems in them… both good and bad. You will find pages with Byron and Keats, MacLeish and Eliot. But you will also find pages and pages of the kind of poetry that is much too often published in churchy publications: sincere and urgent rhymes written by sincere and urgent rhymers.

I like to think that Hugh knew the difference between the two kinds of poems he collected: the truly great and merely sincere. He must have because it is obvious in every other way that he was he was a careful and thoughtful reader.

Hugh was first and foremost a pastor. The poems he collected were not the poems a poet would collect, or an English professor, or even a simple language-lover. They were poems collected for specific purposes… a sermon, a home-bound visitation, study and meditation. That, of course, is true of all of the quotes that he collected: bible texts he took the time to type, prayers, book and article excerpts, and all the poems good and bad.

Today’s page from Hugh’s Notebook shows this literary tension quite well. On a single page we have lines excerpted from one of the most famous poems in the English language typed directly below a poem by an unknown poet with one of the worst extended metaphors one could imagine. What could these two poems – one great… one un-great… possibly have in common?

Both are, of course, lyrical nature-poems. “Tintern Abbey” (or more properly, “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798″) is famous precisely because it makes the case so eloquently for there being a place in poetry for the lyrical nature-poems. Indeed, Ms. Chaffee’s poem is the poor poetical kin of what Wordsworth… and the Romantics… worked so hard to bring into poetry and art. Only because Wordsworth had written “Tintern Abbey” could Ms. Chaffee years down the road write her poem about October.

From a poetical point of view, there are no other similarities between the two poems. Ms. Chaffee’s poem uses a loose rhyme scheme, Wordsworth’s is simple blank verse. Wordsworth is subtle where Ms. Chaffee is heavy handed, clumsy, obvious to a fault. Wordsworth requires thought and concentration… while Ms. Chaffee’s requires nothing at all.

But theologically, and that after all is the ultimate point of Hugh’s notebooks, the two poems are quite similar. Both point to the fact that we can see and experience and know something about God through nature. From this point of view, it is clear why the two two poems are put together on a single page.

According to Hugh’s notation system, the Chaffee poem with the bad pirate metaphor was used twice in a sermon… exactly 5 years apart. It is difficult to tell from the notation system whether he also included the lines from Wordsworth as well.

Read from a pulpit Wordsworth can be hard to digest. Not so much the Chaffee lines. They are simple and straightforward, extremely accessible. And for a preacher… that would have been the most important thing of all. The pastor thinks about poetry in a much different way than the poet.  And that is how it should be.

Enjoy!

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…Reading one’s own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet’s tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain. How he slows up a line to savour it, remembering what trouble it took, once upon a time, to make it just so, at the very moment, you may think, when the poem needs crispness and speed. Does the cat snarl or mew the better when its original owner – or father, even, the tom poet – lets it out of the bag, than when another does, who never put it in?  ~ Dylan Thomas

Mild Winter (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

A recent comment posted here from one of my blogging buddies, Ron Scheer of Buddies in the Saddle, got me thinking about recordings of poets reading their work.

Sometimes the experience of hearing a poet read his or her work can be illuminating or exhilarating. Sometimes it can be disappointing for all the reasons that Dylan Thomas suggests above.

I have been collecting discs and iTunes over the years of recorded poetry, some read by actors and some by the poets themselves. I like to listen to poetry being read when I am walking the dog at night. There is something about moving through the darkness to the music of language that is as near to prayer as anything I know.

Copyright law and a conscience will not allow me to post some of my favorite recordings here. But here are a few links I think you may well enjoy.

Links to poets reading their works

Walt Whitman
This is a scratchy wax recording of Whitman reading just a few lines from “America.” But listen a few times and you will get a sense of the true power and beauty of Whitman. Whitman reading link.

W.B. Yeats
There is an other-worldly quality to this recording of Yeats reading “Lake Isle of Innisfree” that seems appropriate to a poet who spent so much time writing and thinking about the magical and mystical. There is a sense of a voice coming from beyond this world in the way Yeats reads his much beloved poem. Yeats reading link.

Robert Frost
I first heard this recording of Frost reading “The Road Not Taken” in an American Literature class. It was, I must admit, a bit of a shock to hear his flat, Yankee voice reading a poem I had memorized and recited to myself so many times. My first response was to not like the way he read this and the few other poems of his we listened to. But over time I have grown to love the sound of Frost reading. Frost reading link.

W.H. Auden
There is no poet I enjoy hearing read his own work more than Auden. He reads his poems exactly as I read them in my own mind, only better. Since Auden was a compulsive re-writer, sometime you hear when he reads a poem slight differences from what you may be familiar with or have in one edition of his printed poems. Here is a recording of Auden reading “First Things First.” Auden reading link.

Dylan Thomas
Thomas is legendary as a reader of his own work and that of others. This and “Fern Hill” are his best known poems and his most popular recordings. If every English teacher could read poetry to their classes like Dylan Thomas does, I think poetry would be more popular than music. Thomas reading link.

Donald Hall
Donald Hall has been much mentioned here at MontanaWriter. I enjoy the recordings of Hall reading his work. There are a number of his poems that have become favorites of mine only after hearing him read them. Here is a recording of Hall reading “Gold.” Hall reading link.

Langston Hughes
Next to Auden, there is no poet whose recordings I value more. Hughes also reads his poetry exactly as I read them in my own mind. Where Auden’s voice captivates me in its essential Britishness, Hughes’ voice captivates me in its essential Americanness. Listening to Hughes read his poetry, one begins to wonder if maybe Hughes can be said to be the most American of all poets. Here is Hughes reading “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Hughes reading link.

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Quiet Landscape (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

For the last few weeks, MontanaWriter has been quiet. Silent except for one posting as I have been struggling to quiet my heart and mind enough to write.

Writing – all art and thought – requires a quiet mind… and a quiet heart. That is what Yeats meant when he wrote:

(Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.)

It is what a hundred saints have told us about prayer and the spiritual life.

I was born with a birth defect to my ears that required multiple surgeries over many years to repair. I have long suspected that my virtually quiet early childhood is the  explanation for many aspects – good and bad – of my personality, of my way of relating to others and the world.

My standard line in response to those who ask why I love poetry so much and why I prefer writing poetry to prose, has always been: “poetry seems like the most natural thing for one who has struggled with language all his life.”

I am fortunate that silence so easily abides with me… at least most of the time. But for the past few weeks a quiet heart and a quiet mind have been much removed as I have been struggling to make peace with some life changes that have meant less down-time in my life, less time to read, to reflect, to sit still in the silence.

In these two weeks, the first plowable snow of the year has come to the North Country and already melted… a foretaste of the feast to come. Today it is unseasonably warm. There is much to give thanks for on an unseasonably warm day. Mostly I am thankful for the comfortable quietness I feel settling down around me again. I pick up my pen. I begin to write….

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(copyright m.a.h. hinton)

A number of readers have told me that they like my Seven Basic Rules on How NOT to Read a Poem. Some have written to me that they have forwarded it on to friends or fellow writers, or re-posted it on their own blogs. Others have asked permission to reprint it for a class or writer’s group. I am always happy to find out  that someone has found anything I have written helpful or interesting.

A small number of readers have also asked me to say a little bit more about how I do read a poem. And so for the past few months now, I have been thinking about how to explain how I read poetry. I have even taken a few stabs at the topic but am always dis-satisfied with the results. Because in the end it amounts simply to this: You read a poem with a pencil and your ear.

When I read a poem, I always do it with a pencil or pen in hand. Now that I am also reading poems electronically via Kindle (or half-a-dozen other reading apps), I always have the highlight function at the ready. I have a pencil in my hand to underline and mark the lines I like best… the ones that stop me in my tracks… the ones I find myself repeating.

Reading poetry is not about figuring out what a poet really means so much as figuring out what you, as reader, most enjoy about each poem and each poet. What line(s) or image(s) or combinations of sounds most catch your ear or eye? What line(s) do you find yourself slowing down to re-read… to repeat? Which line(s) or image(s) or combinations of sounds would you like to share with a friend? A lover? Which line(s) or image(s) or combinations of sounds will you remember tomorrow? Next week? Three decades from now?

Which line would you like to memorize and take to your grave?

That is how you read a poem: with a pencil and your ear.

And given that… from now on as part of my poetry reviews I will include a note of my favorite line(s) or image(s) or combinations of sounds.

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