Why I Read: Poetry

For a time in high school (and very sparingly in college), I considered myself a poet. I think a lot of teens do. We get a fancy looking journal for Christmas (or purposely buy one from Barnes and Noble) and we start writing little four line stanzas in ABAB format “expressing our feelings” and thinking we know what we’re doing.  Even a limited exposure to the world of poetry demonstrates how minuscule what we know actually is, but many teenage poets would just as soon say, “Just write what you feel; form is too restricting.”  Dabbling in sonnets and blank verse proved otherwise for me, but I ultimately fell out of the practice.

Something, however, that hasn’t stopped, due in part to a friend who buys me poetry books for Christmas, is the practice of reading poetry, though I’ll admit up front I don’t read as much as I would like.  Whether it’s the medieval poems of the Sufi mystic Rumi, or the more contemporary likes of Edward Hirsch and Li-Young Lee, poetry has a special place in my heart that appeals to my half-starved romantic side.  It’s nice to sit down and take a poetry book one entry at a time, ruminate on it, and perhaps read some more. There’s no getting to the next page to find out the next part of the story with poetry (unless it’s epic poetry, such as Paradise Lost or The Iliad); you just read one poem at a time.

Most men will read poetry because reciting it leads people to think them intelligent, or, at the very least, to pick up women in bars.  These are horrible reasons to read poetry for either gender, so here’s a couple good reasons to read poetry:

1. Learning about self-expression. Whether within the confines of Shakespearean Sonnets, or the wild unpredictability of E.E. Cummings free verse, poets express the best and worst of humanity with beauty and grace.
2. Good for the soul. Some poems I’ve read have, in turn, read me, and left me with an introspection I could not have received with hours of self-reflection and search.  A good poet knows not only to tell you how they feel or think, but to hold up a mirror and show you the same things about yourself.
3. Learn timeless truths.  I’m a theology student, and I love to read systematic texts and academic writings regarding things like the resurrection and the union of God and Man in Jesus Christ, but the men who articulate such things learned of them not from theologians, but from ancient biographers and poets.   It’s no coincidence that there’s one massive book of poetry in the Bible, and songs and poems throughout to mark special occasions or to teach people to pray.  Poets recognize the truth, and (in the words of Evey from V for Vendetta) use “lies” to tell it.
4. To sound intelligent and pick up women in bars (OK, not really).

Anyway, go pick up a book of sonnets, or perhaps some free verse. It’s good for you!

Friday State of the Blog!

My apologies for a lack of posting this week; I’ve been rather busy with non-reading activities, unfortunately.

Someone finally died in Death On The Nile! It is therefore now interesting, and I will be continuing to read it.

Added: what is this thing called love by Kim Addonizio. This came as a gift from a friend of mine, and I picked it up out of a desire to read a little poetry, even though I never got around to reading How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch.

Other than that, I’ve scrapped Collected Essays by James Baldwin and Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. Part of this decision comes from frustration with Kant and distraction from Baldwin, but I’ve also decided to put aside nonfiction in the interest of research and development of a church service I’m assisting in planning. Therefore, all my nonfiction energies will be directed there until further notice. I don’t think it’ll be an overly long time, but it will be as long as it has to be.

Have a good weekend, guys!

What Poets Don’t ALWAYS Do

I remember trying to write poetry in high school, the key word being try. I still have my old notebooks that I wrote them in, and I remember very clearly carrying them around with all my books, prominently displaying it on top so that any girl who asked would find out that I was the sensitive type who wrote poetry on a regular basis. My plan backfired, of course, because most girls at my high school really didn’t care if you wrote poetry, and, frankly, it was pretty awful.

The upside to this experience was that I actually continued to write poetry. I got a little less public about it (I think), and looked at new forms and styles in which to fit my teenage angst. What helped so much here was that those new forms (sonnets, mostly) forced me to think about what I was writing. It wasn’t always a free-for-all, and I learned, at least a little, better how to express myself.

What surprised me, however, was the reaction from some of my friends in high school who also wrote poetry, who thought that “form” and “style” were restrictive and that poetry was all about “writing what you feel.” If you submitted your feelings to form, you weren’t writing poetry. You were writing an essay.

Now, being much older and wiser now, I know this isn’t true. Truthfully, I haven’t written any poetry since college, but in reading Hirsch’s How To Read A Poem, I’m learning even more how good form can be for what you’re writing. Hirsch even talks about people who “write what they feel.” For millennia, people have thought poets were slaves to their passions and the Muses, only producing whenever they feel “inspired.”   It is true that poetry can’t be entirely willed, that there’s something about it tied to madness, as Plato knew, but, “there is no true poetry without conscious craft, absorbed attention, absolute concentration,” as Hirsch says.

That’s exactly what the inner inspiration of poets brings.  It’s a “transfiguring passion. A force beyond the confines of the conscious self.” Poets depend on “a force beyond the intellect,” and yet, they utilize their intellect to express what that force speaks to them.  Does that mean that you MUST have form in your poetry?  By no means!  One of my all-time favorite poets, Allen Ginsberg, didn’t utilize traditional forms in his day at all, but employed new ideas, similar almost to jazz music (with a little help from Walt Whitman), to express himself and what he saw was happening in his generation (see Howl, one of my favorite poems period).  However, never should we SHUN the use of villanelles, sonnets, sestinas, limericks, haikus, and the myriad others that exist.  All forms (or lack thereof) can breathe life into poetry, the poet, and the reader.

Just don’t write poetry for the sole purpose of getting girls.

Friday State of the Blog!

Man, what a horrible week. Horrible couple weeks, in fact. Night shift and this horrible cough just left me completely wasted and unable to comprehend half of what I’ve been reading lately. However, since I still have today and Saturday off, one can only hope that progress will be made!

Wright: Well into chapter four, and almost through part one of the whole book. He’s spent this portion of the text mostly just discussing where Piper and other opponents of his have been misinformed as to his views, as well as demonstrating how men of the Reformation, such as John Calvin, actually intended, and attempted, to read Paul in a first-century Judaism context, something Luther avoided, and what Wright’s opponents avoid as well. The more I read this book, the more I think that people really just overreacted to what Wright was saying.

Hirsch’s How To Read A Poem has progressed very little, probably because my every attempt to read him was stifled by a violent cough or a pounding headache. He’s been using metaphors to describe what poems are, such as calling them “messages in a bottle.” It’s very beautiful, but difficult to comprehend when ill. I’ll attack this with new vigor today, probably.

Today is also Good Friday, and, lately, I’ve felt very distant from any idea of God, Jesus, or anything relating to Christianity. There’s a lot of factors going into it, I’m sure, but I’m hoping to also take a portion of time today to refocus my spirit and welcome God’s presence in my life instead of spurning it. This is no desert period; this is something I did, somewhat intentionally, I guess. Either way, I am dry, and I want to come back to the rain.

Everyone have a happy Easter. Let’s work on being an Easter church.

“The message of Easter is that God’s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you’re now invited to belong to it.”-N.T Wright

Reading About Reading: Yes, There’s A Point!

Some of the books I read have stupid titles, or at least ones that make you go, “huh?” Take How To Read a Book and How To Read A Poem for example. Shouldn’t I already know how to do this? Why bother reading a book on it?

Well, let me tell you how I came into contact with How To Read a Book.  When I was in college, I studied theology (hence why so many books I read are on the subject). I was having a hard time retaining the information I was receiving in class and in the books I read, so I went to my professor and asked him if there was a way to help this.  He had two answers for me:

1) Get off Facebook during class and listen to what I’m telling you.

2) Read Mortimer Adler’s How To Read A Book.

I didn’t follow either piece of advice well, but I eventually got to read How To Read A Book sometime last year.  Though I still have some difficulty applying what’s in it because I’m impatient and scatter-brained, it really has aided me in better grasping the contents of the books I read.  Why?  Because there’s a right way and a wrong way to read books.

Adler points out that most people don’t engage in active reading whenever they’re reading a book.  While his book was written in 1972, this is all the more true today.  The books people read today are designed to be easy, to not be overly engaging, and many of them can be finished without much work.  The classics we read in high school, as well as some of the more contemporary Pulitzer-Prize winners, intimidate and turn people off to reading because they’re too hard.  There exists all number of reasons why, but I don’t feel the need to get into that.  The point is that, if you’re going to read more, you need to work at it.

What about the poem book?  I’m approaching poetry with the same way I approached my theology reading: I don’t know how to do it well.  I used to write poetry in high school, and a little in college, but I never did much to read it unless I was trying to looking sophisticated to girls.  Fortunately, a friend of mine actually studied poetry in-depth in college, and he’s managed to keep in me a decent interest in poetry and the poets that write it.  What’s even better is that How To Read A Poem is written by Edward Hirsch, a well accomplished poet and college professor.  I have a copy of his Lay Back the Darkness and the contents are wonderful.  As I amass a greater library in the future, I will be collecting more poetry, and I’m excited to read more of it and fall in love with it.

Want to learn more about how to read well?  I have a whole page up there are the top dedicated to it.  Check it out!

Friday State of the Blog!

So, NT Wright’s book, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision, is coming along nicely.  I’m onto chapter three, where Wright gets into the thick of Law-Court metaphor. His writing here is a lot different from some of his other books; there’s definitely an academic side to this, though this one has a bit of an edge to it.  While he seems to be doing all the can to not hulk out over his opponents accusing him of things that they’ve misunderstood, there’s definitely a slight edge in his tone.  It’s also a bit more fast paced, at least through the first two chapters.  I haven’t gotten far into chapter three yet, because when you have a respiratory bug, and you’re coughing and hacking so much your head pounds, you tend to not want to read theological treatises (polemics in this case? not sure…) on justification by faith alone.  However, I should be done with this before I do my Boston train ride reading marathon in a few weeks.  Got quite a bit of time off next week.

I also picked up another book off my shelf, finally tapping into my poetry reserves (sort of): Edward Hirsch’s How To Read A Poem and Fall In Love With Poetry. Yes, I do already know how to read a poem, but given how I’ve enjoyed Hirsch’s poetry, and how reading a book of poems can be a drag to me sometimes, I wanted to get some more perspective about how I could be doing it differently. So far, the book is lovely, comparing each poem to things like finding a message in a bottle, or a conversation with a complete stranger.  Hirsch loves poetry more than anyone I’ve ever met (save my friend Mike, who comments on this blog on occasion), so this should be a big help.  I also intend to finish this one before leaving for Boston.

Finally, I’ve been pondering whether or not to get my own domain name and leave WordPress behind. Michael Hyatt, CEO, publisher, and blogger extraordinaire, recommends serious bloggers do so. After talking with a few of my other blogger friends, it’s definitely something I want to do in this year. Another friend of mine (quite by accident) even gave me a potential name: brainy rhetoric.  What do you guys think?

Alright, I’ll see you guys Monday! Have a good weekend! Look forward to some immense discussions in the coming two weeks!  Going to have a LOT to talk about!