This past week, my first chapbook of poems was released by Kelsay Books. I am very pleased with the book and am happy it is out. Yet I know many people who claim to not like poetry. What I usually learn after talking about it with them is that they don’t like sentimental, rhyming verse, or they don’t like reading as though there is some message to decode. Decoding is something they were actually taught in high school. These two extremes represent their experiences with poetry, and I have to say that I agree with them. But I don’t think of poetry as sentimental or decoding acts.
Another problem compounded by Hallmark, Inc., I think, is that for many today, poetry would seem to amount to little more than decoration. We think of poetry and we think of the delightfully carved figures around a cathedral door–but not the useful thing, not the door. To those of us who like good poetry, though, poetry is not decoration. Poetry is the door. It challenges the way we see, believe, reflect, value, name. Poetry represents the quickest, most astonishing and vivid account of our experiences. Perhaps for some of these reasons, the romantic poet Shelley once called poets “the moral legislators of the world.”
I make no such claims for my poems, of course, and these are not necessarily ideas you will read in a current poetry textbook. They are mostly my own cobbled together ideas meant to mount a humble defense of poetry. And I’m not saying that all of my poems in this new book achieve what I’m suggesting here. But I often find, in reading poetry, that I can recognize things. I think of poetry as being like thought lightning. A long time ago, Hillary Clinton, when campaigning against the insurgent Barak Obama, said “We campaign in poetry, we govern in prose.” Her campaign slogan, if not poetry itself, is true enough, perhaps, if it gets at the visionary and even aspirational qualities of poetry and the slow, plodding nature of even good prose.
The experiences conveyed through modern poetry are as varied as existence, and it is also true that modern poetry is given to language games, since language is the medium of poetry and experience. I have one poem in my chapbook that moves the littlest bit in that direction. It plays with language theory a little (“Countertop, the Word”). But the thing is, I try to keep it playful. And I don’t think it is very hard to follow what is going on.
My chapbook collection, which I should note is only 42 pages, begins with a poem I wrote when my oldest daughter was about six months old and beginning to make sounds that seemed more and more like speech. The poem has a balancing act in it, because I began to learn then that parenting involved something like walking a balance beam. There are poems in this collection that involve grief and memory, including one about my grandfather who was an immigrant and did very well for his family. There is a poem about stopping in a strip mall after my wife was diagnosed as cancer free after having a brain tumor removed. There is the poem I had to write three days after my son took his life. The final poem tries to capture something that happened to my wife in the middle of a day of teaching with a bird that wandered into her music classroom.
Regardless of your feelings about poetry, I hope this will encourage you to read some poetry this year. It doesn’t have to be mine, certainly. Make it something that you find clarifies your own thinking and experience a little.
Thank you for reading. The link to my chapbook on Amazon can be accessed here.
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