Poet's complaint

[vaneramos]

It's harder being a poet than it is being gay. Same-sex attraction makes sense to most of the people I know, but open-minded, subtle, artistic people often admit to finding poetry incomprehensible.

Oh I know we all love it to some extent. It's part of our musical culture. We idolize the Leonard Cohens who also happen to know how to set their words to music. But you seldom catch people swooning over Jane Hirshfield or Cyrus Cassells.

Sometimes we poets gather ourselves together for readings where we speak our language. To us it sounds like plain English (or Spanish or Bengali, as the case may be), but to others it is a puzzle. Perhaps the audience might include sympathetic painters and political activists who nod their heads and applaud clever metaphors and radical phrases.

But for me the hardest part is that the best poetry is small, rare and lies like a petal on the page. It doesn't amount to much, unless you are willing to stay with it, lie with it through a sunny afternoon, embrace it, let it make love to you, or war, or war and love.

I keep writing and writing. You have to pour out pages and pages of words, sift them, sort them, rearrange them, then go back to pouring again. I've been writing for years, and I think I have written a few really good poems. Shining poems. Three or four of them, I would say. Fifty or sixty lines of brilliance. Let's be generous and say two lines for every year of my life.

It is a life. It's not a living.

I have to be comfortable with solitude, and uncomfortable with it. I have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. I have to accept not fitting in very well with most of the ways people organize themselves.

With other poets at least we know it's okay, and yet we are all islands in a way. Each of us has a vision and must be true to it.

I have to accept the frustration and bewilderment from people who wonder why I can't just say what I mean, or get a solid job as a technical writer or something. The reason is, being a poet, I can't stop. And I can't explain. I can't even make sense of ninety per cent of the words I write.

No, I can't stop. I wouldn't want to. I wouldn't trade it for anything. That would be an abomination, like giving my children or the man I love over to slavery. In fact, it would be giving part of myself to slavery.

Poetry is the freedom to say what I must.

Comments

[art-thirst.livejournal.com]

What made me want to be a writer was poetry. As a young child hearing my mother and grandmother reading poetry to us, I felt totally amazed in the way one could take the normal everyday words we used and turn them into something magical. That's what poetry is.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

My mother loved daffodils and would recite "I wandered lonely as a cloud" by William Wordsworth. Other than that I didn't have much more than the usual exposure to poetry as a child. But maybe one spell-binding poem is enough.

[art-thirst.livejournal.com]

I was read from Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Langston Hughes. During middle and high schools I read Margaret Walker, and others I can't recall at the moment. I also had subscriptions to African American publications that focused on poetry, prose, short stories, novels, plays and that kind of thing. I was also very interested in ready about music and what few black artists were written up. I was deeply into the cultural world, and still am.

Nat'l Public Radio program I ran across

[art-thirst.livejournal.com]

'Who I Am': Poetry Not Wasted On The Young

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126119314

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

I am slowly gaining an appreciation for what you mean in my work with lyric. But I agree that there is a profound kind of avocation and sensibility in poets that, although it has wellsprings in lyric, goes much beyond that.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to disparage lyric writing. Having one of my poems recently become part of a choral piece has been an amazing experience. Music carries the words to a higher level.

I wouldn't have said poetry "goes much beyond" songwriting. I've been trying to participate in the local poetry slams, where there is a crossover between musical rhythms, poetry, "spoken word" (which is distinct from poetry), and sometimes even melody.

But there is a difference, and you have nailed it with the idea of avocation. And the themes are different. Lyrics are widely (though not entirely) about love, and frequently some of the very best songs (Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell come to mind) use love as a metaphor for something else. Whereas only a small percentage of really good poems are about love, the rest are about other things.

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

Oh, lyric is wonderful. I heard you praising it, while still explaining a difference, and I think I understood what the difference is, or at least some of what it means to you, better than I have at other times.

I feel ... at a loss, I suppose .... if I don't pick up a musical instrument on a regular basis. I'll be on vacation away from my own things and will need to duck into a store that sells new or used instruments and just hold one for a while and strum a few chords, or tickle the keys. And as you know, this is an avocation I didn't entirely discover until I was past 40. Yet it feels, not compulsory, but compelling, in the way I think you are talking about.

I believe I may, reading your words, have gotten a glimmer of what your vocation means to you.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

To provide a glimmer to you in particular makes me especially happy.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

One of my favourite things is this:

The Poet, by Jane Hirshfield.

[queenmomcat.livejournal.com]

One of your poems became incorporated into a choral piece? so why weren't you bragging about this more?

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I have. Here are the tag and the text (friends only). We will premier it in Toronto on May 1, and then in Guelph on May 8. On May 22 we will perform it in Winnipeg at a festival of GLBT choirs from across Canada.

[queenmomcat.livejournal.com]

(sheepishly goes to follow the links)

[poetbear.livejournal.com]

"I have to accept the frustration and bewilderment from people who wonder why I can't just say what I mean, or get a solid job as a technical writer or something. The reason is, being a poet, I can't stop. And I can't explain. I can't even make sense of ninety per cent of the words I write.


No, I can't stop. I wouldn't want to. I wouldn't trade it for anything. That would be an abomination, like giving my children or the man I love over to slavery. In fact, it would be giving part of myself to slavery.


Poetry is the freedom to say what I must."

just so.~paul

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Aye, thank you!

[artricia.livejournal.com]

This is both true and beautiful.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Truth is part of the reason why.

harder being a poet than it is being gay

[queenmomcat.livejournal.com]

(amused) You're right at that; I've been [espoused] to a poet for some years now and I still don't get how one comes up with poems. The best I can come up with is a perplexed "That's nice, dear. Did you do the dishes?"

Re: harder being a poet than it is being gay

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

See, no sympathy! ;-)

[inishglora.livejournal.com]

You always manage to make me consider things in a new way. What a privilege. Thank you. :o)

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I'm glad. Thank you.