Introduction

The Art of Poetry

A reasonable question might be, "why poetry?"when much of the world has
access, for images, to gorgeous video. For emotion, in reliable surges, we have
access to a range of music recorded and live. For information and opinion, an
electronic social space extends its clamoring, infinite marketplace. Given such
abundance, why this ancient practice of artful words, on the scale of a human
voice?

Those last words, the scale of a human voice, answer the question.

For me, and for this course, the answer is precisely in the human scale of this art:
intimately, as each person imagines saying the words of poem, or actually gives
voice to those words, the poem takes place. The meanings and feelings and
sounds inhabit that person. As the old formula goes, the poem gets under your
skin.

Poetry is uniquely on a human scale. Its material is language, the language used
every day for all sorts of practical purposes, and its medium is each individual
persons mind and voice. The poem doesnt convince me in the way a piece of
brilliant rhetoric or a great speech might do; it gives me another kind of
conviction: a conviction that this is the way to say something I feel.

That feelinga kind of physical as well as intellectual sensation that these are the
right wordsmade me fall in love with poetry when I was quite young. It
motivates Singing School, the book that is a central recommended text for this
course.

In a contemporary culture of brilliant art on a mass scale and celebrated

performances available to tens of millions, through digital technology, there is a
special urgency to the lyrical art that takes place in any one persons bodily voice.
That voice is not necessarily the voice of the poet, or the voice of a skilled actor,
but any readers. It may not even necessarily be the readers actual voice, but
imagined: a reader hearing the poem in the minds ear.

The best demonstration I know of this principle is in the Favorite Poem

Project videos. Having stated it in a general way, Ill give an example, with a short
poem:
Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blue-black cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

Id wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, hed call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of loves austere and lonely offices?

The last two lines of this poem by Robert Hayden (1913-1980) have stayed in my
memory. By saying them to myself, inwardly, or actually pronouncing them, I feel
a certain, specific excitement and solace, regret and victory. Like repetition in a
song, the repeated phrase What did I know, what did I know, intensifies a
feeling. That feeling is developed and extended by pausing after the first know
and continuing after the second know that does not pause but instead spills
over into the object of knowing: the poems unforgettable last line.

When I say the poem to myself, Im aware that much of the language is slightly
more formal than my normal way of speaking, or thinking. For instance, the No
one of No one ever thanked him is not what I would say. I would probably say
nobody ever thanked him." Similarly, in the line and polished my good shoes as
well (a line that often makes me feel like crying), I would probably say and
polished my good shoes too.

Its not just the part-rhyme with hed call that makes as well more expressive
than too would be, as No one is more expressive than nobody would be,
for this poems feeling. The rhyme is part of it, but the little, slight, almost invisible
touches of formality in the poem, contrasting with the simplicity of things like the
rooms were warm, have an appropriate coolness that gives the poem an
additional authority, moving me in a way that completely colloquial or warmer
language might not.

For me, that slight formality, a little sense of ritual in a mostly plain-spoken poem,
reaches its fulfillment in the heartbreaking, triumphant last word: offices. What
a cold word. Like a sharp icicle, it penetrates the conflicts and ambivalences of
love, including love in a family, love firmly tied into the chronic angers of a house.

It has been said that rhetoric is for an argument with the world, while poetry is
for an argument with oneself. When I say to myself the words of Those Winter
Sundays, I feel that kind of conflict and ambivalence, fear and love, muteness and
expressiveness. That web of feelings is in the exact words of Haydens poem, and
it is in me.

RP

"Those Winter Sundays". Copyright 1966 by Robert Hayden, from

COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT HAYDEN by Robert Hayden, edited by
Frederick Glaysher. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.