Poetry

Warning-- post about poetry! (As you may have guessed from the title.)

So in looking for the poem about my grandfather, I found my senior portfolio from college. It was strange to read those poems again, so many years later. As I mentioned before, some of them stand up better to the passing of time than others, but generally speaking they seem too often to skim the surface without really getting at the meat of things. Sure, there are some nice images, but that's not enough.

In the summers before my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, I attended the week-long Catskill Poetry Workshop. The first year it was geared toward high school students, probably in an effort to interest some of them in attending Hartwick College. The college had held a high school poetry contest and awarded a full scholarship to the poetry workshop to the winner-- I came in second, but went anyway. The second year, the workshop was no longer geared toward high school students, and was mostly adults.

Anyway, at one of the workshops, we discussed Rilke's The Panther (I'm partial to the translation by Stephen Mitchell, myself-- I have a book of his collection of Rilke's poetry) and talked about how the poem seemed to be about one thing (a panther in the zoo) but was also about something else --the poet's feelings about being abroad in France, or another situation that we don't know the details of, but don't need to because by giving us the panther, the poet lets us appreciate in that depiction a metaphor for any number of situations, and in this way the poem resonates for many different people in many different ways. You know, basically the whole "show, don't tell" adage. Well, I think I took that too much to heart, and often tried to let the images speak for themselves, as Rilke does.

In most cases, I was not very successful. Something was missing-- almost as if I had captured the images first, then thought, "Hmm, that sounds deep--could be a metaphor for something" instead of first figuring out what it was I actually wanted to say, then consciously shaping the poem to that end.

The problem is that in my four years as a creative writing major (concentration in poetry), I was never really pushed to go beyond. I had been warned that if I was really interested in creative writing, I should really study literature. At the time, I brushed that off-- it was much more fun to write my own poetry and workshop it than to spend a lot of time studying other people's stuff. Of course I did read a lot of poetry on my own, and some in class-- mostly contemporary, but not all-- and went to readings and all of that, but I can see now that yes, it would have been much more useful to study real poets. If I had gone to Hartwick, I'm sure that I would have gotten much more out of the time spent. Too much of the workshop time at my university was spent on discussing bad poetry (ostensibly, one had to submit a portfolio to be admitted to the workshops, but in practice the famous but elderly poet who was teaching them didn't want to discourage anyone so admitted everyone who applied) with other students, most of whom didn't really have a good enough handle on things to make very useful criticism (and I include myself in that group.) Maybe it can work well in other contexts, but the workshop format was pretty much a waste of time in that situation, especially since the teacher did not intervene enough to really guide the process.

So in the portfolio, there are some decent ones, but a lot of nuggets that could possibly be developed into something more (I did place one of them here.) And of course some that probably are not worth ever looking at again. In any case, I am not particularly interested in reworking old stuff, but every once in awhile I come upon something-- a poem online, a book, an article-- that gets me back into that poetry mode again, and makes me want to start writing again. Except it's been so long I don't know where to start. And the stuff of my life now-- parenthood, bills, housework, etc.-- seems harder to fit into poetry.

There are lots of poems out there about motherhhod, but so many are cloying or nice but not particularly compelling. I did find this poem by Sarah Byck today on Literary Mama and it's definitely worth a read.