What's a Poem?


Linda called me a couple of days ago and mentioned that her daughter-in-law is taking a course in poetry, or some aspect of creative writing, and that she was trying to explain what poetry is, and what makes it different from other writing. "Well," I said, "it's the oral tradition, and so the meter and pattern is set so that it can be remembered and passed along."
"That's good," she said. "Could you tell her what poetry is? I can't express it as well as you do."
"Well now that's an easy assignment. What is poetry? Thank you so much for delegating."

I've never studied poetry but when I was a kid, I took to some of it with the same enthusiasm as to Mark Twain's stories of his travels through the west, in "Roughing It," and Homer's Iliad and "Odyssey," which I found in an attic of an apartment house we moved into when I was eleven, and with which I became enthralled. I didn't know that it was poetry. To me it was just high adventure.

When I was older I realized that some guy named Homer didn't sit down and compose this poem in it's current form, but that it was composed over a long period, during which the very nature of human consciousness can be seen to evolve. And with time I began to understand why H. Bloom called Homer the forefather of everyone who reads and writes in the western world.

If I take up the Iliad today and start to read it, I'll be bored, because the language is too difficult and my attention will drift. But when I was eleven I somehow looked through the language and saw the battles and felt the emotions of the siege of Troy. I was inside of something and it possessed me and held me in a trance until it was done with me. The Iliad and Odyssey are a vessel inside which a western man can be contained. There might be a period of years in a man's life, for example, where he is a pig. There might be a woman who's bad news for him but he can't let go of as if he's under a spell. He might get separated off from his friends and family.

To the man contained by the Iliad, he knows that this is the Island of Kalypso, and that he has been turned into a pig, but it is a temporary condition and only intervention by the gods can free him. He accepts it. This has a great advantage over being a sinner in need of return to the righteous path, because it isn't personal. Marion Woodman said that one can stand archetypal suffering -- where we're all in the same boat -- but that personal suffering is unbearable. Being under the spell of Kalypso is not personal. The poem is the map, and with it you relate to the territory.

So poetry is at the foundation of civilization, because it provides a container for development. Other poems which are foundational are Beowulf, The Descent of Inanna , Gilgamesh, Dante's Divine Comedy, and the list goes on and on. Poetry is written for the voice, even if you read it with your eyes you have to "hear" it with an inner ear to connect emotionally. Otherwise you might see what it means in terms of symbols or something but you don't get fed. Thus you have a net loss of energy and will not like poetry.

But poetry isn't just the foundational stories passed along in oral tradition. There is something to be said for the idea, though, that the more you have these foundational poems in your memory, the less need you have for authority figures, civil or religious, to protect you from unknown evil forces. You are not unfamiliar with them and so they are neither unknown nor evil. What becomes visible is every form of huckster and con man imaginable trying to sell something to somebody dumber than him, or her.

The foundational story of a culture is the one thing which cannot be removed without everything collapsing. Joseph Campbell pointed this out. A culture can lose everything except their underlying mythology. If that goes, you've got no cohesive group. So the great poems, and the great stage plays, of the Greeks, are foundational information needed for a free person to live a free life. They are personal empowerment, and without them people revert to superstition and irrational fears. When you participate in a tragedy at the theater, the psyche is balanced, and doesn't have to act it out in the streets.

There are other kinds of poems, of course, like this one by Len Cohen:

I bought a man his dinner
he did not wish to look into my eyes
he ate in peace

I think my favorite poem from youth was "The Raven," by Edgar Allen Poe, because it was music. It was music and lyrics in perfect combination. "Ah distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December and each separate glowing ember wrought its ghost upon the floor." That as opposed to, "It was December, nasty weather in London as you might expect, and I was in a mood." Maybe poetry is like pornography, maybe you can't define it but you know it when you hear it.

One poem that stayed in my memory was on the title page of "Report to Greco," by Nikos Kazantzakis, which I read while I was in Crete. As I remember it:

I said to the almond tree,
sister, speak to me of Spring,
and the almond tree blossomed

The online references to this poem have it as:

I said to the almond tree
friend (or, sister), speak to me of God,
and the almond tree blossomed

Nowhere is it referenced the way I remember it. But the way I remember it is the way I like it, and the way it remains. And it might even be the way it was translated in my English edition of the report to El Greco, the legendary artist of the lsle of Crete, from his spiritual grandson.

One of Kazantzakis' major pieces of work was a new translation of the Odyssey.

And now for something completely different ....

I am a man of constant sorrow,
I've seen trouble all my days.
I bid farewell to old Kentucky,
The place where I was born and raised.

The place where he was born and raised!

For six long years,
I've been in trouble.
no pleasure here,
on earth I've found.

For in this world,
I'm bound to ramble,
I have no friends to help me now.

He has no friends to help him now!

It's fare thee well,
my old true lover,
I ne'er expect to see you again.

For I'm bound to ride,
that Northern Railroad,
Perhaps I'll die upon this train.

Perhaps he'll die upon this train!

You can bury me in some deep Valley,
For many years, there I may lay.
Then you may learn to love another
while I am sleeping in my grave

While he is sleeping in his grave!

Maybe your friends think I'm just a stranger,
My face you'll never see no more.
But, there is one promise that is given,
I'll meet you on God's golden shore.

He'll meet you on God's golden shore!

That version of a traditional song is by the Soggy Bottom Boys, a fictional group from the Cohen Brother's movie, "Oh Brother Where Art Thou." It doesn't sound like it's connected to Homer, but it is.

The movie is based on The Odyssey. Some parts are skipped over with a suggestive sequence, such as Calypso's Island. Other scenes, such as the seduction of the men by the Sirens, and the encounter with the Cyclops are more detailed. (His sheep are the Klu Klux Klan men in white robes and the Cyclops is John Goodman in an eye patch as Big Dan Teague, a con man of God.)




Got to run now. A special hello to my friends from JJ4. Please drop a note and say hi.

Posted: Wed - February 14, 2007 at 12:35 PM