Toronto’s Women’s Post March 2004 Vol. 6 No. 3
I loved poetry when I was a kid and have fond memories of Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, Dennis Lee’s Alligator Pie and Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. My interest and obsession with poetry continued into high school, thanks to an English teacher who made classics interesting. I memorized sonnets and love poems by Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Byron and Dickenson. I even earned an A+ or two for some sonnets and odes I penned myself in lieu of writing long-winded essays for my literature class.
Studying poetry until I felt like I’d solved a series of meaningful puzzles used to be satisfying. Writing it used to be exhilarating. So I’m not exactly certain when I became disconnected from poetic language and the rapturous sound of words.
Ask me why I don’t read or write poetry now and I have a fistful of ready excuses: I don’t have time to appreciate poetry the way I used to. Contemporary poetry lacks the polished elegance of that of the dead masters and the classics are no longer relevant. Studying poetry in graduate school was vampyric - draining every last drop of passion out of me in favour of rational, scientific criticism and, worse even, deconstructive (more like destructive) literary theory.
Yet the real reason is that I fell out of love with poetry because I’ve separated myself from passion. I’ve divorced myself from the phantasmagorical. I’ve relinquished imagination, fervour and the strange, forceful mysteriousness to which depths of rich language leads.
If a poetic sensibility could be described as form of spirituality, I would say I’ve lost my faith. I still remember pantheist Wordsworth’s sonnet, "The World is Too Much With Us" by heart and its strangely apropos sentiment: "Getting and spending we lay waste our powers/ Little do we see in Nature that is ours/ We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!"
Had you asked me about what I thought about poetry a mere two months ago, I would have shrugged, perhaps even foaming myself into a thick rant about its irrelevance in the chaos of today’s media carnival.
But then I happened to read copy of Toronto-based poet, Elyse Friedman’s collection, Know Your Monkey. I’m not going to go so far as to say it was epiphanic, but I quickly developed an unusually strong rapport with the poems. I devoured each poem in quick succession then immediately wanted to reread them. Friedman’s poems are short. Her word choices are uncomplicated. Her poetry carries wry observations without over-sentimentalizing or waxing fake erudition:"Mostly they appall me/ Humans/ Their scrabbling hunger/ Their love me love me/ Their I’m going to kill you," she writes in "Affection."
Friedman believes in the "Magic, manic, miracle words/ that would make/ daisies scream/ snowflakes bleed/ fish leave the ocean." She champions words that "settle debts/ erase regrets/ feed the hungry." And I want to be the writer she describes as "singeing the page" while writing at the laundromat, "as the Stanfield’s tumble/ and the towels twirl."
Talking about how poetry moved and affected you seems as flaky as divulging all the secret sensations of your lover’s kisses. It’s embarrassing to discuss all the emotional goo that well-crafted poetry dislodges and all too easy to primly avoid it altogether. While we’re comfortable enough to occasionally admit a movie brought us to tears, rare is the person who expresses how a poem made them feel, probably because we don’t read poetry anymore. Poets I’ve met who are trying to make it the stuff of their life’s work don’t even read it.
Yet poems are meditation through language. When you breathe poems out loud, words resonate in the air, and, more importantly, inside of you. They fill voids like no vice can. Now that I’ve accrued a certain wizened urban cynicism, I doubt I’ll ever again be able to access the same heightened, raw emotions I did as a teenager when everything felt immense and unfettered and reading poetry was divination. Yet I’m rediscovering that poetry matters to me. I’m surprised, actually, at how much.
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