At the Turquoise Table: Poetry In The News

At the Turquoise Table: Poetry In The News

Poetry In The News

Jeffery Brown is a Journalist and PBS Chief Correspondent for Arts, Culture and Society. He co-anchors the nightly news program on PBS and also hosts “Art Beat”, the News Hour’s online arts and culture segment.

As a reporter, Brown speaks of the necessity of sticking to the facts and of not being able to express the emotions that sometimes arise with the telling of a particular news story.  He has now expressed some of these emotions in his recently published book of poetry aptly called “The News:Poems”.

The New Poet Laureate is the first Latino named to that position.  

Jose Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera is the son of Mexican immigrants.  He was born in California to migrant farm worker parents. He traveled up and down California with his family, but with the help of a program for disadvantaged students was able to attend UCLA. He went on to earn a masters degree in Sociology from Stanford, but then turned to the realization of his passion for writing by attending the Iowa Writers Workshop for a MFA in poetry.

Write he did…poems, plays, children’s books…both in English and Spanish, sometimes combining both in one work.

Connecting with people is important to Herrera. “I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems.” It promises to be a lively year ahead for Poetry with our new Poet Laureate at the helm. Bienvenido Juan Felipe Herrera!

What Is it About Poetry?

I recently read two articles in the newspaper that touched and amazed me and started me wondering what it is about poetry that makes it powerful. The first story concerned a soldier, who upon killing his enemy decided to go through the dead man’s pockets. I’m not sure what motivated him to do this or what he hoped to find, but what he found shocked and puzzled him.  There on a folded piece of paper was a poem.

The second story was about a mother’s effort to reach her troubled teen-aged daughter who was deeply depressed. Her daughter was acting out her despair in a rebellious way by refusing to wear shoes to school. It came to an ultimatum from the school, shoes or no school. Shoes had become a touch point, a focus of her daughter’s depression. The mother was inspired to use the shoes as a place of connection and hopefully of healing. She began to leave a folded poem in her daughter’s shoe each morning to let her see 

that “people had been in pain before and had struggled to find hope.”  The poets took that pain, that struggle and put those thoughts into the best, sparest words they could.

After some time, the mother noted a change in her daughter…the dark cloud seemed to lift a bit.  At the same time, she found the poems unfolded in her daughter’s pockets.

She was reading them and they were beginning to have an effect. “Poetry knew where hope lived.”

An enemy soldier carrying a poem in his pocket, a troubled teen finding a poem in her shoe every day, reading it and finding hope again. Pretty powerful stuff.  I am not promising you a magic elixir, but it seems there is something about poetry that deeply touches the human heart, gives it comfort and helps it to heal. And perhaps more.

Science and Poetry

Strange Bedfellows.  Not Necessarily.

A friend and I attended a poetry reading at the Folger Library in D.C. in December.  Rafael Campo, a poet and a medical doctor read the poetry of Emily Dickinson, as well as some of his own.

Wait a minute…a medical doctor writing poetry…that had to be interesting.  It was! 

Rafael Campo is a practicing physician at Harvard Medical School and at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is also a published poet since 1993.  He has published several books of poetry and two prose collections, including “The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry.” 

There it is in the title…the merging of science and poetry, a confession of Campo’s strong belief that poetry (and other arts) is an effective treatment for our illnesses.  Poetry can heal us not only emotionally but physically.  Art nurtures that strong connection that exists between our mind/heart and our body.

Campo’s poems describe his world vividly, blood and guts, birth and death, sickness and recovery.  As part of his healing path, Campo also teaches writing classes to patients and medical students. Campo’s hope is that these future doctors will perhaps become more sensitive, more personal, more human, and more compassionate in their interactions with patients through their contact with poetry.

In his lecture, Campo noted Emily Dickinson’s profound scientific knowledge that permeated her nature poetry.  She had studied botany for years and worked in her home garden with devotion.  To know something so well may inspire deep feelings of awe and inspire the poet to write about them lyrically.

I think Emily Dickinson did in the past and Rafael Campo is doing so today.

Emily Dickinson

 

Rafael Campo

Poetry By Heart

I wish I had a photographic mind.  Then I could pull up hundreds of poems from memory and recite them word for word by heart.  Alas, that is not the case.  I have a few poetic lines tucked in the brain folds which rise to my lips to be recited for comfort, fun or for the “see I’m a cultured know-it-all “ gamesmanship face-off.  

I envision the substantial value of having great poems in my memory bank to use in crises. It is not likely I will be actually imprisoned (although one never knows), but at times when my thoughts imprison me in fear, loneliness or worry,  I would like to displace them with the well remembered lines of a beloved poem.  

The other meaning of by heart relates to writing a poem.  It is useful to know something about the technique of writing poems…like rhyme, meter, alliteration, metaphor, etc.

It is important to have some of these to use if we wish, but more important to remember they are tools and not the meat of the work.  That comes from the heart, the depths, the heat of the writer.  The tools cannot get in the way of the connection to the writer’s center…that sincere, authentic, hardscrabble voice of the soul…poetry by heart.

I am not saying that the words can be spilled on the page without discipline or some structure…because they then become just non-sense.  

Iambic pentameter you have a valid place in the world of verse, but don’t let me get so fixated on you that I cannot write by heart.

Photograph by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

The Limits of Poetry

 

I am reading Edward Hirsch’s “How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry”.  It is his own Ode to poetry…a Hymn of praise…264 pages long.   It is a love letter to the poems that touch his heart, bring meaning to his life arouse his feelings and that enrich and comfort him. 

 

In 2011, Hirsch experienced the sudden loss of his son, Gabriel and found no solace in the poems that once impassioned his heart and quieted his mind. Gabriel, 22 years of age, died

from the club drug GHB that someone gave him at a party. It was a harrowing three days before Hirsch found out what had happened to his son. 

 

Father and son - Blois, France - Kathleen Tyler Conklin

Hirsch stopped reading and writing poetry after this traumatic shock.  But he began to record the memories of his son by talking with friends and relatives, writing them down compulsively and haphazardly.  After a while his outpouring of words began to take the shape of a poem.  It became a 70 page elegy to his son; a book length poem recently published called “Gabriel”.  The New Yorker called it a “masterpiece of sorrow”.

 

The poem is written in three-line stanzas without punctuation…a kind of stream of consciousness, a deluge of memories, love and grief.  Perhaps an effort to etch Gabriel’s spirit on the page...to bring him to life with words. Hirsch admits he put everything he could into his poem, but also had to face what poetry could not do.  His passion had been cooled by this tragedy.  He had a new awareness…that poetry has limits. “It cannot give us back the people we have lost.”

 

And yet, in a sense by writing this astounding elegy, Hirsch has given Gabriel to us.

The Woman Behind the Poet

My last blog was on the poetry of war.  I didn’t want to leave this topic without drawing your attention to the poems of Karl Shapiro.  Karl Shapiro won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1944 for his “V-letters and Other Poems”.  He sent his work from New Guinea, where he was serving in World War!! as a medic, to his fiancé, Evalyn Katz, who was living in New York City at that time.  Shapiro had published a chap book of his poems and had a few poems published in literary journals, but was not a well-known poet.  He needed an advocate and in Evalyn he had found one.

Evalyn was his persistent, hard working editor, and the catalyst for getting his war poems published. I know from personal experience the determination of Evalyn, Shapiro’s first wife, as I met her many years later and became her close friend. I don’t often name-drop as I have few names to drop, but feel that a shout out to her is deserved as the woman behind the poet. She did the hard work of “pounding the pavement” to advance his reputation.  Karl, of course, did the hard work of writing good poetry.

Karl’s career took off after he returned home from the war.  He taught at Johns Hopkins University, The University of Nebraska, The University of Chicago and the University of California at Davis. He also became the editor of Poetry and Prairie Schooner Magazines. He was appointed as Consultant in Poetry to The Library of Congress (1947-48), a position now known as The Poet Laureate.

Most critics agree Shapiro was a good poet, but his work doesn’t seem to have stayed in the poetic limelight as much as some of his contemporaries. I’m not sure why this is so other than the whims of the poetry gods.  I recommend looking at some of his poems.  “Wild Card”, a collection of his poems with a forward by Stanley Kunitz is a good place to start. It includes many of his war poems.

 

Karl Shapiro-1913-2000

Evalyn Katz Shapiro 1918-2007