In school, our teachers made us learn poems line-by-line.
They prescribed us assignments like they were Valium, and we were depressed.
So we wrote long essays about great poets W.B. Yeats, William Shakespeare and T.S. Elliot.
And they bestowed Bs and As and Bs on the students who offered examples of symbolism, onomatopoeia and alliteration.
After graduation, we put our poetry books down and forgot all about T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, Seamus Heaney’s “Bogland” and W.B. Yeats’ “Easter, 1916”.
Back then I wished I could have enjoyed these poems, but years passed before I could read another without thinking of English coursework, exams and grades.
Reading Poetry
They called it the Great Recession.
I called it being out of work.
For a year, I didn’t have much money to pay the bills, let alone buy new books.
The Japanese have a word for letting new and unread books pile on top of each other: Tsundoku.
My pile was rather high.
So I pulled down book after book from my shelf and I came across Open Ground by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. It’s an anthology of his best works.
At the time, I was taking a college course in digital marketing. Each afternoon, while taking the bus into the course, and each evening on the way home, I read Heaney’s poems.
In “Digging", he wrote
“Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.”
His poems felt like salve on an open wound.
One time, I angered my wife and disappointed a friend. Afterwards, I came across “If” by Rudyard Kipling.
I listened to this poem repeatedly, searching for answers for what I did wrong.
I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I gradually felt better about myself. The student in me wanted to write an essay about how it’s “neither subtle nor experimental”.
The adult in me was happy I’d found Kipling.
On Slow Reading
In February 2017, I travelled to Bruges in Belgium with four friends.
The morning after a late night, I spent almost a hundred euro buying homemade dark, alcoholic chocolates. When I got home, I gave boxes of chocolates to my wife and son.
I kept one large box for myself. After a difficult day at work, I opened it up and began to eat.
After just three chocolates, I started to feel sick. They were too rich and heavy to eat all at once. I took several weeks to finish the box.
It took me almost a year to finish Open Ground.
When I read more than three or four poems at once, the words weigh me down. Instead, I prefer to linger on a stanza or a line. Then I close the book.
I let the rest of the poems keep.
Writing Poetry
I’ve spent hundreds of hours and a lot of money learning skills like copywriting, writing for the web, blogging, storytelling and so on.
I’ve learned how to optimise articles so Google kindly ranks them. I created spreadsheets of my favourite books and detailed the key moments in favourite stories so I could understand the authors’ intentions.
I’ve even rewritten chapters from my favourite fiction and nonfiction books by hand so I can breathe in the authors’ sense of style.
I’ve taken apart writing I love like a mechanic does a car engine.
Now, I can’t read a book without taking notes, capturing ideas and forming opinions. I’ve all but ruined watching great films because I identify the obligatory scenes before they happen.
I almost never try to write poetry. Instead, I’m happy to sit for a moment and read.
Raymond Carver let me off the hook. In “The Poem I Didn’t Write” he said,
“Here is the poem I was going to write earlier, but didn’t because I heard you stirring.
I was thinking again about that first morning in Zurich.
How we woke up before sunrise.
Disoriented for a minute. But going out onto the balcony that looked down over the river, and the old part of the city.
And simply standing there, speechless.
Nude. Watching the sky lighten.
So thrilled and happy. As if we’d been put there just at that moment.”
Understanding the Mechanics of a Great Poem
One spring weekend, my wife and I stayed in a luxurious hotel in a remote part of Ireland. The concierge greeted us with open arms at the front door, took our heavy bags and offered tuna canapés.
We were altogether outside of our comfort zone for those two days.
When checkout came on Monday, I asked the receptionist,
“Where can we leave our bags? We’d like to use the leisure club before going home.”
She smiled. “Right this way sir.”
The concierge took us behind the oak reception desk and into a cold store room.
Inside, stacked on top of a rickety wooden table, a 14-inch television displayed security camera feeds from around the hotel. Someone had pinned a duty roster of the hotel, dockets and stock order forms to a beaten-up yellow corkboard. A large blue cable ran across the cold concrete floor.
Here amidst the inner workings of the hotel, the magic was broken.
I don’t want to understand how a poem is put together. I would rather keep them as mysterious, private pleasure.
Finding Your Way Into Poetry
Today, some of my favourite poets include Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski, Emily Dickinson and Seamus Heaney.
When I told one friend, he looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
I told another.
He asked me, “How can I start reading poetry?”.
“Try Poet’s Corner narrated by John Lithgow,” I said. “In the audiobook, he introduces Dylan Thomas, William Blake and Gertrude Stein.”
Even though I avoid musing on the mechanics of these poems, the poets’ style seeps into my day.
Recently, I read “Crow” by the British poet laureate Ted Hughes. The bleak imagery stayed with me for weeks.
“When God, disgusted with man,
Turned towards heaven.
And man, disgusted with God,
Turned towards Eve,
Things looked like falling apart.”
What you read can change your mood.
When I read Bukowski, I’m more abrasive.
When I read Carver, I’m more melancholy.
When I read Dickinson, I’m more obscure.
Be careful what you ask for.