De Vinck: Unfortunately, it’s National Poetry Month

I am sorry to say that April is National Poetry Month, as if poetry needs an awareness campaign. Like much in the United States today, poetry is sinking to the lowest common denominator, lacking sense and sound, and celebrating writers for their fame and less for their talent.

How many times have you read a poem in the last year and said to yourself “What? I don’t get it.” Often the reason you don’t get it is because there is nothing to get but a bunch of words piled into broken lines with disjointed images created for a supposed effect of profundity when, in reality, the work is a pretentious mess.

Much of modern poetry today is compared to modern art: it exists to dazzle, to shock, to elicit a reaction from the audience and the reaction is good enough, even though the poetry is second rate.

Giving an honest critique of poetry today is like trying to say that Babe Ruth was a lousy ballplayer. Babe Ruth was not a lousy ballplayer, and we all know it because we have proof: his statistics. If you say a poem is lousy, people will say “Poetic taste is subjective. Who are you to judge?” Anyone can write a poem. Few write poetry.

To judge the quality of a poem is to read an abundance of poetry. The more you know, the more you know. The more poetry (stats) you accumulate, the better judge you will be on the quality of what you are reading.

If you never had apple pie before, your first piece is sublime, but after years of tasting different pies, you have a much better taste for what is delicious.

My 5-year-old grandson loves the color and shape of dandelions. He picks them whenever he has a chance. When his parents took him to the New York Botanical Gardens, he was dazzled.

Same with poetry: There are people writing dandelion poems and people writing poems made from fields of lavender.

If you want to learn how to find quality poems, you need to educate yourself. Begin with the poetry of Walt Whitman, who almost single-handedly helped us break away from the stodgy and pretentious traditions of rhyming schemes and sonnets as he used vivid images and common language. Hear the sounds he made with sentences, and how he used all the tools of poetry and not just isolated formats. Listen as he speaks the voice of mechanics and carpenters at work:

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck

Then read the quiet voice of Emily Dickinson:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

Read the poems of Dr. William Carlos Williams that he wrote between patient visits, poems using concrete images and simple language mixed with compassion:

I will teach you my townspeople

how to perform a funeral

for you have it over a troop

of artists -

Listen to the plaintive cries of Anne Sexton: “I am a collection of dismantled almosts,” and Kenneth Rexroth, “To think of you surcharged with Loneliness,” and Sylvia Plath, “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”

Let Mary Oliver tell you about the fields of dry seeds and sparrows. Delight in the poetry of Li-Young Lee, then study the philosophy-poet, Wallace Stevens “Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”

Finally when you read the sensual, exact, passionate Pablo Neruda, then you are ready to tell the difference between a poem that is a dandelion and a poem that is a rose. “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”

Poetry is not a trick, or a way to mimic Shakespeare. Poetry does not seduce or spit, or find its way to the ocean and gather shells.

Poetry is not your mother, not the taste of your first kiss. Poetry is not sentimental, or regal, not made for academics, or for their interpretations.

Poetry is a single word in the darkness. Poetry gathers daffodils at dusk. Poetry is what is left when there is death.

They say a poem cannot conquer a nation. It depends on what nation: the nation of America where we are all citizens and seek a single chair at the beach where we can play with our children and build sand castles.

Poetry is a letter to the gods, asking them to teach us how to dance.

Too often poetry today is judged not on the quality of the poem, but on the pretense of publication, and on the bark and yelp of the writer’s reputation.

A secret. Shhhh. Bob Dylan is not a good poet.

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