April 14, 2020
NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 12
April is poetry month here – and I’ve been thinking about poetry as aid and comfort, as inspiration, challenge and even rescue. A friend has been around town pinning up well-loved poems in public places: John Masefield’s Sea Fever down by the sea port, beside boats that are going nowhere.
Dear All,
An extra post for an extraordinary Mayday. Mayday! The universal distress signal, a call for help. Also, across much of the world, a day for workers’ celebration and holiday. We might remember both, at this moment, when everyone is feeling the distress and many people are either out of work, or working too hard. April is poetry month here – and I’ve been thinking about poetry as aid and comfort, as inspiration, challenge and even rescue. A friend has been around town pinning up well-loved poems in public places: John Masefield’s Sea Fever down by the sea port, beside boats that are going nowhere. Fragments of poems come to me at odd times: when I am hanging out laundry, Richard Wilbur’s lovely image of angels “some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses…” popped up. (Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World). Poetry moves in with us, comes close and whispers to us in times of stress. I look for balance, find William Blake’s “Man is made for joy and woe/ and when this you surely know/safely through the world you go.” I feel sadness, remember George Herbert’s “Sweet spring, full of sweet hours and roses, a box where sweets compacted lie.” (Virtue). I feel judgmental and hear Shakespeare’s “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Shakespeare will always let you know what’s false and what, true. It’s as if we are all contemporaries now, time seems to have stopped, and the wisdom of poets from the past is with us more than ever. Both William Carlos Williams and Auden noticed that nobody can live well without poetry. Auden wrote in In Memory of W.B. Yeats “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” (What poetry will we be hurt into in our time, I wonder, by crazy America?) And Yeats himself knew what to do when stressed – “I went out to a hazel wood/because a fire was in my head.” (The Song of Wandering Aengus.)
I don’t have my mother’s ability to reel off poetry – she could recite Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold by the yard. But I do want to commit favorite poems to memory, more systematically than I have, simply because I want them close, in my head not just on the page or screen.
There’s a story, maybe apocryphal, of two poets – Galway Kinnell and Robert Bly? – making a pact to write a poem a day each and not judge it. “What if they are not any good?” one asked. The other replied “Lower your standards.” With this in mind, I embarked a week or two ago on writing a poem a day, suspending judgment in the interests of simply getting something down. I’m continuing this practice, for as long as it takes – and yes, it means ignoring the critical voice, just keeping going. (I’ll come back and be critical later.) I conjured up the voices of three writers I admire and love, who have also been teachers of mine in the past, so I can hear their actual voices in my head: Jane Hirshfield, Billy Collins and Sharon Olds (she who first told me when I arrived from the UK that in America it was all right for a poet to go over the page.) With three such godparents, poems may have half a chance. And, the times we live in seem to welcome them out into the light of day.
Be well, be safe.
Affectionately, Ros
Without Her, and my latest poetry book, Invisible Horses, published May 2019, is available from Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, New York. To see more, click the button below …