The End of Poetry.

Cover of Robert Lowell’s ‘Life Studies,’ 1959

“You’ll never be alone with a poet in your pocket.”

                                                – John Adams

By Dick Loftin.

I enjoy poetry. Some of my favorite poets are Billy Collins, John Updike, Langston Hughes and especially Robert Lowell, even though it took me decades to understand his work. But I hung in there. And maybe that is what is unique about poetry from any other form of writing. You have to give poetry time. Poetry is an “interior” form – give it enough time and it will get inside you.

I have tried to write poetry and many of the poems I have written read like I was “trying to write poetry.” I think good writing—the best, actually–has a way of dropping out of the sky. It kind of appears. Yes, you should work at it and set a time for it [if you ‘wait’ to be inspired, you may never be] but I do think some of the best writing “comes from the spirit,” as John Lennon once said.

After writing poems for a few years on a semi-regular basis [I would like to do a book someday – there’s always a book, isn’t there?] it is just in the last week where I thought I had written a poem that ‘appeared.’ One that arrived on the paper, legitimately as a poem. It wasn’t forced or ‘created,’ or even expected. It simply made itself known. It made itself alive. The best writing is ‘alive,’ isn’t it?

April is National Poetry Month. The one month out of the year when poetry is, or should be, at the top of everyone’s literary mind. Read some. Write some.

In the Wall Street Journal on April 1, 2013 [and I don’t think it was an April Fool’s joke], The Poetic Justice of April 1 was published. An interesting piece on the state of poetry by Joseph Epstein. Epstein seems to think that poetry is dead. Or dying. “When was the last time you bought a contemporary book of verse,” he asks?  I bought some Billy Collins recently—a year or so back. And I picked up some Ogden Nash and some other poets at a book fair in February. But I don’t think he’s talking about me – or you. I think he’s talking about ‘them’ – the public. You know, those people with not-as-good taste in anything as you. Especially poetry. Absolutely poetry.

Epstein says poetry is finished: “This even though reams and reams of the stuff gets published, prizes awarded, poets laureate appointed to the resounding boredom of all but those who either write or teach poetry (usually one and the same people).” Harsh, I guess, but I have some theories.

I think many people do not buy poetry for one reason. The books are a lousy deal. Not the poems or the poets, but the next time you’re in the book store, check out the poetry section. The books are skinny little volumes, only about eighty pages or so—and they’re $18.00. Are you kidding me?  Eighteen bucks for a book of under 100 pages. Sorry, I don’t care how good the poems are, that’s not a very good deal. And I’m not trying to be funny, it’s just that I think there needs to be more book there. Really, give me 200 pages. That’s fair for $18.00. Maybe $25.00 for hardcover. John Updike’s final book, a wonderful collection of poems, titled, Endpoint, is $25.00 for 96 pages in hardcover.  Still kind of thin, but it was his last book and after all, it was Updike. I tend to shop for Collected volumes of poetry. There is more book there, and I like to get everything. I like to read the lines written from the poets very early years, say the 1940’s, 1950’s, up to the end of the collection, which could be fifty years later. I like to try to find the differences and the growth in the work. I enjoy reading Robert Lowell. His Life Studies [a great title, to begin with] was a book I read off and on from my mid-20’s onward. I am just now, over thirty years later, beginning to understand what Lowell was trying to say. I read Billy Collins because he is fun, interesting and easy to read. Langston Hughes has an unmatchable depth to his writing that goes right through me. His The Negro Speaks of Rivers, is a masterpiece. I bought Wallace Stevens’ Collected Poems because it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1955, the year I was born. I admit that his poems are over my head. Maybe I should spend more time with them.

A poem I really like, one I just discovered, called, An Adventure, by Louise Gluck, was published just recently in the New Yorker [April 1, 2013]. It is a poem about the passages of life. I must be beginning to understand poetry, because I understood this one. Gluck’s most recent collection of poems is Poems 1962-2012. This is a collection I will probably buy because it meets my criteria for poetry.  It’s a big book, just over 650 pages, and covers fifty years of poems—there is a lot to discover in a collection this big. I like that.

I think poetry is unlike any other kind of literature. I think poetry takes time. I think it requires a quiet place to read it and absolutely to write it. Poetry is demanding. Poetry will require a lot of its reader. It requires more of its writer. Poetry will sit you down when you want to run away. It will capture you and hold you still when you need it the most. Poetry is alive and it will speak to you, if you will only listen. Find a quiet spot and spend some time with a great mark of literature. Poetry.

Source Material: 

Cover image of Robert Lowell’s landmark book, Life Studies, (1959) from poets.org. Visit poets.org, Here. Read a Wikipedia profile of Live Studies, Here.

Read An Adventure by Louise Gluck, from bookofjoe.com, Here.

Information about National Poetry Month, from poets.org, Here.

Read The Poetic Justice of April 1, by Joseph Epstein from the Wall Street Journal [April 1, 2013], Here.

Find some poetry on Amazon.com., Here, or better yet, visit your neighborhood bookstore.