From Jay Parini at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Poetry doesn’t matter to most people. They go about their business as usual, rarely consulting their Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Frost. One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry.

In the 19th century, poets like Scott, Byron, and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were best sellers, and they were cultural heroes as well. But readers had few choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps falsely, that people actually liked poetry. It provided them with narratives that entertained and inspired. It gave them words to attach to their feelings. They enjoyed folk ballads, too. In a sense, music and poetry joined hands.

In the 20th century, something went amiss. Poetry became “difficult.” That is, poets began to reflect the complexities of modern culture, its fierce disjunctions. The poems of Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens asked a lot of the reader, including a range of cultural references to topics that even in the early 1900s had become little known. To read Pound and Eliot with ease, for instance, one needed some knowledge of Greek and Latin poetry. That kind of learning had been fairly common among educated readers in the past, when the classics were the bedrock of any upper-middle-class education. The same could not be said for most readers in the 20th century — or today, when education has become more democratized and the study of the classics has been relegated to a small number of enthusiasts. The poems of the canonical poets of high modernism require heavy footnotes.

Yet poetry can make a difference in the lives of readers. I’ve always known that myself, having read and written poems for at least four decades. Every morning I begin the day with a book of poems open at the breakfast table. I read a poem, perhaps two. I think about the poetry. I often make notes in my journal. The reading of the poem informs my day, adds brightness to my step, creates shades of feeling that formerly had been unavailable to me. In many cases, I remember lines, whole passages, that float in my head all day — snatches of song, as it were. I firmly believe my life would be infinitely poorer without poetry, its music, its deep wisdom.

One tends to forget that poetry is wisdom. I was in Morocco recently, and a devout Muslim mentioned to me that the Prophet Muhammad, in his book of sayings, the Hadith, had said as much. But the Koran also teaches, I was told, that poets are dangerous, and that decent people should avoid them. That reminded me of Plato, who wished to ban all poets from his ideal republic because he thought they were liars. Reality, for Plato, was an intense, perfect world of ideas. The material world represents reflections of that ideal, always imperfect. Artistic representations of nature were thus at several removes from the ideal, hence suspicious.

But Plato also had other worries about poets. In the Republic, he complained that they tend to whip up the emotions of readers in unhelpful ways. They stir feelings of “lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure.” Poetry “feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up,” he said, while only the “hymns of the gods and praises of famous men” are worthy of readers. The law and reason are far better.

Although Plato didn’t quite sink the art of poetry, he cast suspicion on the craft, and poets since then have rarely been comfortable with their place in society. Even the popular Romantic poets — Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and others — lived on the edge of the social whirl, not quite respectable. More recently figures like Allen Ginsberg have derided their country. Poets have an unruly streak in them, and have not been the most welcome guests at the table of society.

Teachers and professors have long considered poetry a useful part of the curriculum, and one of the last places where poetry remains a central part of the culture is the classroom. To a degree, poets have been “domesticated” by the academic village, welcomed into its grove. Frost was among the first poets to get a big welcome on the campus, and he taught at Amherst College for much of his life, with stints elsewhere. He spent his last decades crisscrossing the country, appearing at colleges, reading and lecturing to large audiences. He believed firmly in poetry as a means of shaping minds in important ways.

In “Education by Poetry,” one of his finest essays, Frost argued that an understanding of how poetry works is essential to the developing intellect. He went so far as to suggest that unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values, “you don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you.” Those are very large claims.

Poets do make large claims, and they are usually a bit exaggerated. In his “Defense of Poetry,” Shelley famously wrote: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I prefer the twist on that offered by a later poet, George Oppen, who wrote: “Poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world.”

I don’t especially want poets to make laws or rule the world. For the most part, they would perform very badly in those public ways. The world of the poet is largely an interior world of the intellect and the emotions — where we mostly live, in fact. And poetry bolsters that interior realm. In a talk at Princeton University in 1942, when the world was aflame, Stevens reflected on the fact that the 20th century had become “so violent,” both physically and spiritually. He succinctly defined poetry as “a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pushing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of poetry, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.”

The pressure of reality is indeed fierce, and yet poetry supplies a kind of counterpressure, pushing back against external forces that would overwhelm and obliterate the individual. Poets give a voice to the world in ways previously unacknowledged. We listen to the still, small voice of poetry when we read a poem, and that voice stands in ferocious contrast to the clamor in the culture at large and, often, to the sound of society’s explosions.

I always define poetry for my students as a language adequate to our experience — to our full experience, taking into account the interior valleys, the peaks, the broad plains. It gives voice to tiny thoughts, to what the Scottish poet and scholar Alastair Reid, in a lovely poem, calls “Oddments Inklings Omens Moments.” One does not hope for poetry to change the world. Auden noted when he wrote in his elegy for Yeats that “poetry makes nothing happen.” That is, it doesn’t shift the stock market or persuade dictators to stand down. It doesn’t usually send masses into the streets to protest a war or petition for economic justice. It works in quieter ways, shaping the interior space of readers, adding a range of subtlety to their thoughts, complicating the world for them.

Language defines us as human beings. We speak, therefore we exist. We have the miraculous ability to gesture in words, to make statements and requests, to express our feelings, to construct arguments, to draw conclusions. Poetic language matters because it is precise and concrete, and draws us closer to the material world. In Nature, Emerson argues that the sheer physicality of words points us in directions that might be called “spiritual.” He puts forward three principles worth considering:

“Words are signs of natural facts.”

“Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.”

“Nature is the symbol of the spirit.”

Those statements formed a platform of sorts for the Transcendental movement, which studied nature closely for signs of spiritual life. The principles remain worthy of reflection. At some level, words suggest natural facts: “rock,” “river,” “bird,” “cloud.” The leap comes in the second statement, which posits a spiritual world. One can, I think, leap beyond conventional notions of spirituality here and acknowledge a deep interior world wherein each of us lives, no matter what our religious persuasion. I think of a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins: “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.” The mind has those heights and depths, and few have not sensed them, stood in awe of their terrifying majesty. That is the spiritual realm, which one can extend in any direction. Nature becomes, at last, Emerson’s “symbol of the spirit,” and poetry itself embodies that nature. It is part of it. It mirrors the vast interior world, populates it with images and phrases, provides a basis for the reality of individual lives.

I could not live without poetry, which has helped me to live my existence more concretely, more deeply. It has shaped my thinking. It has enlivened my spirit. It has offered me ways to endure my life (I’m rephrasing Dr. Johnson here), even to enjoy it.

Jay Parini is a novelist, poet, and professor of English at Middlebury College. His latest book, Why Poetry Matters, was published in April by Yale University Press.

via videosift.com

Apologies for the long absence. My desktop computer died. Along with it, I lost all submissions prior to May of this year. I am sincerely sorry.

If you are awaiting a response, please resend your work and I’ll get to it as soon as possible.

Now that I am back, I hope to return to a more frequent posting schedule. I currently have some poetry, but I need photography — please send me your best work.

Thanks for reading Elegant Thorn Review.

The last poem and poet in honor of National Poetry Month from the Academy of American Poets. I will begin posting new work in the next few days. Apologies to everyone who has submitted work and not yet heard from me.

Shampoo & Sponge Bath
by J. W. Marshall

1.

It takes a small face
to see itself
in the handmirror offered

when staff says
it's time to wash that greasy hair.
Says it'll help.

Like a tuber on the pillow
or the shadow of a spade
is how

I remember looking.  Water slopped
on my gown and skin and sheets.
When they laid my head back

into the metal basin
I died and happily that time.

2.

There was a terrifyingly large sky
that first day they rolled me
out for air.

Terrifyingly.
And clouds like balled-up cobwebs.
What if the chair got caught

in a crack or on a rock–I watched for that.
There's one the orderly said
meaning a cloud

that looks like you.
There was weakness in each of them.
There was a fraying wind.  A mess

he said like you
before your bath.

From Meaning a Cloud by J.W. Marshall. Copyright © 2008 by J.W. Marshall. Reprinted by permission of Oberlin College Press. All rights reserved.

Today’s poem and poet from the Academy of American Poets.

Her Body Like a Lantern Next to Me
by John Rybicki

            There's this movie I am watching:
my love's belly almost five months
            pregnant with cancer, 

            more like a little rock wall
piled and fitted inside her
            than some prenatal rounding.

            Over there's her face
near the frying pan she's bent over,
            but there's no water in the pan, 

            and so, no reflection.  No pool
where I might gather such a thing as a face,
            or sew it there on a tablet made of water.  

            To have and to haul it away,
sometimes dipping into her
            in the next room that waits for me.

                        •

            I am old at this.  I am stretching
the wick again into my throat
            when the flame burns down.

            She's splashing in the tub
and singing, I love him very much,
            though I’m old and tired

            and cancerous.  It’s spring
and now she’s stopping traffic,
            lifting one of her painted turtles 

            across the road.  Someone’s honking,
pumping one arm out the window,
            cheering her on.

            She falls then like there’s a house
on her back, hides her head in the bank grass
            and vomits into the ditch.

                        •

            She keeps her radioactive linen,
Bowl, and spoon separate. For seven days
            we sleep in different rooms.

            Over there’s the toilet she’s been
heaving her roots into. One time I heard her
            through the door make a toast to it, 

            Here’s to you, toilet bowl.
There’s nothing poetic about this.
            I have one oar that hangs 

            from our bedroom window,
and I am rowing our hut
            in the same desperate circle.  

                        •

            I warm her tea then spread
cream cheese over her bagel,
            and we lie together like two guitars, 

            A rose like a screw
in each of our mouths.
            There’s that liquid river of story 

            that sometimes sweeps us away
from all this, into the ha ha
            and the tender. At night the streetlights 

            buzz on again with the stars,
and the horses in the field  swat their tails
            like we will go on forever.

                        •

            I’m at my desk herding some
lost language when I notice how quiet
            she has been. Twice I call her name  

            and wait after my voice has lost its legs
and she does not ring back.
            Dude, I’m still here, she says at last

            then the sound of her
stretching her branches, and from them
            the rain falling thick through our house.  

            I’m racing to place pots and pans
everywhere.  Bottle her in super canning jars.
            For seventeen years, I’ve lined  

            the shelves of our root cellar with them.
One drop for each jar.
            I’ll need them for later.

From We Bed Down Into Water by John Rybicki. Copyright © 2008 by John Rybicki. Used by permission of Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.

Today’s poet and poem from the Academy of American Poets:

Stupid University Job
by Sharon Mesmer

Your loveliest of sway-backs;
of mine I was once ashamed,
and my uni-brow and crooked teeth,
and red hair my mother never let me wash
all winter,
afraid I'd catch a draft.
She wouldn't let me bathe, either,
which made gym class a horror.
I thought I had it bad
until I met that handsome Scottish man
whose parents tried to make him spontaneously combust
by feeding him haggis laced with gunpowder
and making him sleep in the stove.
Instead of an ear, he had a shiny, snail-shaped ridge.
I guess we all have our tragic flaw.
Mine is like that of the naked man
who holds up a sign that says "I'm naked"
and runs screaming through the park.
My handlers say I'm difficult,
but don't you believe it.
My soul still radiates a luminous intensity
despite this stupid university job.

From The Virgin Formica by Sharon Mesmer. Copyright © 2008 by Sharon Mesmer. Used by permission of Hanging Loose Press. All rights reserved.

Today’s poem and poet from the Academy of American Poets:

In cold spring air
by Reginald Gibbons

In cold
          spring air the
white wisp-
          visible
breath of
          a blackbird
singing—
          we don’t know
to un-
          wrap these blind-
folds we
          keep thinking
we are
          seeing through

From Creatures of a Day by Reginald Gibbons. Copyright © 2008 by Reginald Gibbons. Reprinted by permission of LSU Press. All rights reserved.

Today’s poet and poem from the Academy of American Poets.

Untitled [To see this evil from its core]
by Philip Lamantia

To see this evil from its core
He spent himself on margins
Crystal edges umbra-ed and broke,
Splintering by measured denials,
Waiting for the hour patience intersected:
The giver capsuled whole the spending parts.

O Mad Love where untempered
You remain, tunneling trains of art—
Deflecting horizonless
		depthless

Light
         on this voice—these sounds—
A heart whose wails you dream
Into actuality swims halfway
To your always perilous obliqued and
Always
          vanished
                        shore.

From Tau by Philip Lamantia. Copyright © 2008 by Philip Lamantia. Used by permission of City Lights Publishers. All rights reserved.

Today’s poem from the Academy of American Poets.

Dangerous for Girls
by Connie Voisine

It was the summer of Chandra Levy, disappearing
       from Washington D.C., her lover a Congressman, evasive
              and blow-dried from Modesto, the TV wondering

in every room in America to an image of her tight jeans and piles
       of curls frozen in a studio pose. It was the summer the only
              woman known as a serial killer, a ten-dollar whore trolling

the plains of central Florida, said she knew she would
       kill again, murder filled her dreams
              and if she walked in the world, it would crack

her open with its awful wings. It was the summer that in Texas, another
       young woman killed her five children, left with too many
              little boys, always pregnant. One Thanksgiving, she tried

to slash her own throat. That summer the Congressman
       lied again about the nature of his relations, or,
              as he said, he couldn't remember if they had sex that last

night he saw her, but there were many anonymous girls that summer,
       there always are, who lower their necks to the stone
              and pray, not to God but to the Virgin, herself once

a young girl, chosen in her room by an archangel.
       Instead of praying, that summer I watched television, reruns of
              a UFO series featuring a melancholic woman detective

who had gotten cancer and was made sterile by aliens. I watched
       infomercials: exercise machines, pasta makers,
              and a product called Nails Again With Henna,

ladies, make your nails steely strong, naturally,
       and then the photograph of Chandra Levy
              would appear again, below a bright red number,

such as 81, to indicate the days she was missing.
       Her mother said, please understand how we’re feeling
              when told that the police don’t believe she will be found alive,

though they searched the parks and forests
       of the Capitol for the remains and I remembered
              being caught in Tennessee, my tent filled with wind

lifting around me, tornado honey, said the operator when I called
       in fear. The highway barren, I drove to a truck stop where
              maybe a hundred trucks hummed in pale, even rows

like eggs in a carton. Truckers paced in the dining room,
       fatigue in their beards, in their bottomless
              cups of coffee. The store sold handcuffs, dirty

magazines, t-shirts that read, Ass, gas or grass.
       Nobody rides for free, and a bulletin board bore a
              public notice: Jane Doe, found in a refrigerator box

outside Johnson, TN, her slight measurements and weight.
       The photographs were of her face, not peaceful in death,
              and of her tattoos Born to Run, and J.T. caught in

scrollworks of roses. One winter in Harvard Square, I wandered
       drunk, my arms full of still warm, stolen laundry, and
              a man said come to my studio and of course I went—

for some girls, our bodies are not immortal so much as
       expendable, we have punished them or wearied
              from dragging them around for so long and so we go

wearing the brilliant plumage of the possibly freed
       by death. Quick on the icy sidewalks, I felt thin and
              fleet, and the night made me feel unique in the eyes

of the stranger. He told me he made sculptures
       of figure skaters, not of the women’s bodies,
              but of the air that whipped around them,

a study of negative space,
       which he said was the where-we-were-not
              that made us. Dizzy from beer,

I thought why not step into
       that space? He locked the door behind me.

From Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream by Connie Voisine. Copyright © 2008 by Connie Voisine. Used by permission of University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.

Yesterday’s poem and poet from The Academy of American Poets.

Balance
by Adam Zagajewski

I watched the arctic landscape from above
and thought of nothing, lovely nothing.
I observed white canopies of clouds, vast
expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.

I thought about you and about the emptiness
that can promise one thing only: plenitude—
and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland
bursts from a surfeit of happiness.

As we drew closer to our landing,
the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds,
comic gardens forgotten by their owners,
pale grass plagued by winter and the wind.

I put my book down and for an instant felt
a perfect balance between waking and dreams.
But when the plane touched concrete, then
assiduously circled the airport's labryinth,

I once again knew nothing. The darkness
of daily wanderings resumed, the day's sweet darkness,
the darkness of the voice that counts and measures,
remembers and forgets.

From Eternal Enemies by Adam Zagajewski. Copyright © 2008 by Adam Zagajewski. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. All rights reserved.