Poetry and Film

In “Poetry” a Korean film to be released this fall in the United States, a sixty-six year old Korean grandmother enrolls in a poetry class at her local community center. She is told by the instructor to look deep and hard at everything around her for the inspiration to write poetry. Great advice. It is advice that can be applied to many of the arts, including filmmaking. The film “Poetry” won the 2010 Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay. Mija, the main character, turns to poetry to help deal with her sullen grandson with whom she lives and her own medical challenges. Poetry as self help? I don’t want to trivialize it by calling it that, but reading and writing poetry can help one find liberation. The Australian poet, Les Murray in his book “Killing The Black Dog” credits writing poetry with having helped to save his life. He goes on to say “I’d disapproved of using poetry as personal therapy, but the Black Dog (depression) taught me better.” The words and images of poetry carry great power.

The images in the film “Of Gods And Men” are also powerful. It is clear that the writer Etienne Comar and the writer/director Xavier Beauvois looked deeply into the lives of the Trappist monks living and working in Algeria during the ongoing civil unrest of the 1990’s. Comar and Beauvois met with theologians and did extensive research as well as contacting the relatives of the deceased monks. The writers and the actors lived for weeks with the monks of Tamié Abbey in Savoie to ensure the authenticity of the film’s historical and liturgical content. “Of Gods and Men” won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2010. The film inspired me to write this poem.

The Monks

I want to tell you about the monks,
that band of mismatched brothers bound
by a strange, strong calling
to live and work in the mountains
between sea and desert.

I want to tell you
of the utter simplicity of their lives,
of their service to the Muslim people
stacked in poverty on the Algerian hillside.

I want to tell you of their fear,
caught in the confusion and cruelty of civil war,
and finally I want to tell you of
their courage and faith
that stuns me into silence.

Close To The Ground

"Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers. but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground."-Noah Webster, lexicographer (1758-1843)

I somehow always sensed that Noah Webster was a smart guy, but I absolutely love this quote. It describes so perfectly for me the fertile ground from which poetry springs.

Poetry is not "an abstract construction of the learned" but arises from "the needs, ties, joys, affections and tastes" of the humanity of the poet. I could add a few adjectives to Webster's list, but why burden a good thing?

I love the idea that the base of language is broad and low. It means to me that good poetry appeals to everyone, does not put on airs---is in fact close to the ground and close to the heart. It is of the earth and earthy. It can take us to new heights, but it flows from our very humanity which after all will end in the earth.

The earth is so much with us these near spring days. As the sun warms it, I can smell it and long to put my hands into it.

I remember my father putting cooling mud on my bee sting when I was a child. It was a folk remedy and probably the coolness that relieved the sting, but who knows what magic healing power it contained. The earth is magical in so many ways. Imagine the potter taking a lump of earth and making it into a bowl from which we eat. And the food that we eat growing from that same earth. Magic.

So here are some thoughts as spring nears.

Live close to the ground.

Write from your humanity.

Celebrate our earth. It might be all the magic we need. It and poetry.

The Poetry Of Love

February, a sometimes hated month because of the snow and cold it brings to many parts of our country, is one of my favorite months. When I was a kid in school, there were two guaranteed holidays---Washington and Lincoln's birthdays---celebrated separately. There was another birthday I used to eagerly anticipate---my own. Then of course, there was Valentine's Day and the poetry of love printed on flimsy paper valentines and passed out in the classroom. The valentine verses were usually pretty bad, but it didn't matter to me, as long as I had an acceptable pile on my desk.

Today, I am thinking about the poetry of love and whose poems would be considered the best. I'm not going to mention the obvious amorous geniuses, but write about two poets who happened to appear---one in a book that I borrowed from a fellow poet yesterday and one that popped into my memory today.

The book "Valentines" is by Ted Kooser, a former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner. This slim volume of poems, published in 2008, is a collection of the annual Valentine Poem Ted sent to women fans and friends on Valentine's Day for twenty-two years. He printed them on the back of a postcard and had them mailed from Valentine, Nebraska. He started with fifty postcards and ended up sending them to twenty-six hundred women in 2007, which was the last year for his lovely tradition. Alas, I was never on the list, but here they are all in one book.

What a mensch and what good poetry.

The other poet who came to mind is Phyllis McGinley (1905-78), also a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1961. She is known mainly for her humorous poetry. I dug out an old book of her poetry (published1954), "The Love Letters Of Phyllis McGinley" and became re-enamored of her wit and skill. I'm going to let her words ensnare you---with just three stanza's from her poem, "A Kind Of Love Letter To New York".



Love is a mischief,


Love is a brat.


Love is, admittedly, blind as a bat.


So I'm in love with


The City of New York.






Too new for an empire, too big for its boots,


With cold steel cables where it might have roots,


With everything to offer and nothing to give,


It's a horrid place to visit, but a fine place to live.






Ah! some love Paris,


And some Purdue.


But love is an archer with a low I.Q.


A bold, bad bowman, and innocent of pity.

So I'm in love with

New York City.

What can I say but---Phyllis McGinley, I love you.

And the beat goes on

I believe that poetry is communication and we shouldn't have to say "huh"?--at least not too many times when reading a poem. We need to say "Ah yes" and feel our heart beat a little more quickly.

Shakespeare's heart beat largely in iambic pentameter (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable called a foot, with five feet to a line) in his plays and sonnets.

You (mostly) get what Shakespeare is trying to communicate once you get into his rhythm. Shakespeare also wrote a lot in rhyme. Some experts say rhyming poems are easier to memorize. Some of Shakespeare's rhyming lines do stick in our collective mind eg."--- the Play's the thing--Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King."

Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" are written in rhyming couplets. Couplets with a meter of rhyming iambic pentameter are called heroic couplets. It is indeed a heroic job to write a poem in rhyming iambic couplets and have it be a good poem. Just because a poem rhymes doesn't make it a good poem. It can be terrible. What's worse is you may not be able to forget it.

Likewise, you can refrain from meter, rhyme or any set pattern and find you have written a lousy poem or a very good one. This is called free verse.

A poem has the best chance of being a good poem, if we worry less about rhyme and meter and more about trying to communicate what we are trying to say and let it come straight from our hearts. That's where all good poetry starts.

Let the beat go on.

The Limerick

My nephew Mark just turned fifty,

The limericks he wrote were nifty,

He wrote with great humor and wit,

His friends agreed they were a hit,

They can't wait 'til he turns sixty.



At his recent fiftieth birthday celebration, my nephew Mark read fourteen (I'm impressed) limericks to 140 of his best friends. They cleverly spanned the story of his life and were a tour de force for some one his age. Also, to show how impressed I was, I borrowed his rhyming scheme for the first two lines of my limerick above.

Since we're discussing age, here's a little of the history of the limerick.

It appears to have originated sometime in the 18th Century in England and/or Ireland.

And according to the limerick scholar Gershon Legman the true limerick is always obscene. How could it not be with a name like that. It seems George Bernard Shaw agrees with him. Need I say more.

In fact, I will. I like the idea that the origin of this type of poem was in the City or County of Limerick in Ireland. The Maigue Poets of Ireland were a fun bunch who liked to play nonsense verse parlour games, which became prototypes for the limerick as we have come to know and love it. Ah, for the good old days.

But, as Mark has shown us the form is old, but not dead. It is simply a five line poem with the rhyme scheme aabba. (Forget meter for now). It is an interesting thing to do with your spare time (think of sitting in traffic) or as a family ties enhancer. It is important NOT to be offensive if you are doing it for the last mentioned reason, although the insult was one of the limerick's main objectives, as popularized by Edward Lear. (It can be used as a way of channeling anger, if you rip it up immediately.) Rule out obscene also unless it's just for private use. We have enough offensiveness and obscenity in other forms. Just have some good, clean fun.

Where has the poetry gone?

Nicholas Kristof


Nicholas Kristof in his New York Times column of November third laments the loss of poetry in our President. He worries that Obama is being faithful to Mario Cumo’s observation of politicians that they campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Kristoff writes that the American people “wouldn’t mind being lifted by an occasional verse of poetry.”


I agree, but I’m not sure we should look to our president for that. I am willing to settle for well thought out lucid prose from the President. We can find our poetry elsewhere.

I think our need for poetry is in our DNA. Note how babies and young children respond to the rhythms of the nursery rhyme. As adults we love the lyrics to our songs, given to us by such poets as Bob Dylan, Stephen Sondheim and Cole Porter. Hopefully, we learn to love and read poetry in our schools. We can continue our love affair after we leave school, by reading poems, attending poetry events and even writing it ourselves.

The pundits have criticized Obama as being too detached and without emotion. Maybe we need to start with ourselves and make sure our passions are getting a workout through remaining connected with poetry. It is out there. Let us passionately pursue it.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/opinion/04kristof.html?_r=1&ref=nicholasdkristof

Reaping The Harvest

Maxine Kumin

Lots of poetry events are happening locally this fall. Eight poet laureates are reading at the Library of Congress this Wednesday, October 6th. What an abundance of riches that will be!

The Library is also offering a Fall 2010 Poetry at Noon Series starting October 19th.

The Folger Shakespeare Library has scheduled "The Hardison Poetry Series" for 2010/11. It began September 28th with Edward Hirsch making the case for poetry and continues once a month into May 2011.

Georgetown University has a 2010/11 Reading Series at the Lannan Center, featuring a plethora of poets.

Who said D.C. was just a government town?

Speaking of Poet laureates, former poet laureate, Charles Simic posted (LC site) a list of things to keep in mind when writing a poem. I thought I'd share a few of them with you.

"Don't tell the readers what they already know about life and don't assume you're the only one in the world who suffers."

"Don't overwrite, but do consider what you are writing down a draft that will need additional tinkering, perhaps many months, and even year of tinkering."

I invite you to consider this your mantra for the month of October.

Tinker, tinker, tinker.

Reap, reap, reap.

 

http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2010/10-187.html