PHYLLIS GREEN

Rock, Paper, Poem - A Learning Exercise

To look at a painting by Vincent Van Gogh is to touch his vibrant and tortured soul, pray thanks and jump back. Knowing we will look again. . .and again. Why? Because he was a poet. It happened he used paint and canvas to express the raw emotion that altered our view of the world. Informed observation, determined workmanship and something uniquely his took that emotion and turned it into pictures that whisper, shriek and howl. There is music and rhythm and repetition. There is form, and there is freedom. Words are not fully formed, they make up by dancing. . .or writhing.

Have I mentioned poets like to exaggerate?

Surely it is not exaggerating to say that poetry is one of the surest routes to intimacy. I am continually astounded by the insights poets are able to convey with thimblefuls of syllables and ink. Pencil, oils, laptop, doesn't matter. Started with a rock and a wall or a patch of dirt, and if we needed to, we could do it again. What is even more astounding is how close we feel after sharing a poem. Every sensible person knows sex can occur without intimacy. Good poetry – real poetry – cannot. In a very real sense, is intimacy.

And intimacy teaches. And yes, to teach is to learn. It is deluding ourselves to think we can help someone improve their poetry without learning more than we teach.

Countless others have put it better.

“What the poet says has never been said before, but once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.”
W.H.Auden

“Writing a poem is discovering.”
Robert Frost

“Before reading a good poem, we are one kind of person, after reading it, we are another.”
Jane Hirschfield*

“The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.”
Lionel Trilling

“By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.”
Rita Dove

“Reality only reveals itself when it illuminated by a ray of poetry.”
Georges Braque

“Poetry gives you permission to feel.” James Autry

“Poetry is the revelation of a feeling the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his [or her!] own.”
Salvatore Quasimodo

“The language beneath the language. This is poetry.”
Andrea Pacione

“Poetry...should strike the reader as a wording of his own thoughts. . .”
John Keats

“Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.”

“Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Robert Frost

“[Poetry]... exploits the rhythmic and euphonic properties of the language that are in themselves revelatory.”
Joseph Brodsky

“The poet doesn't invent. He listens.”
Jean Cocteau

“Poetry is the music of the soul.”
Voltaire

Now let's talk about irony. How often it infuses poetry! Which is fitting when you consider a lot of us would have fallen on the floor in a fit had it been suggested we would become poets. Poetry smacked of being forced to memorize for the sole purpose of adding to our misery during high school. Pedantic readings drier than the pale blue print that mimeo machines reeled out to blind us. The poetry in library books jittered before eyes that kept searching for a window or ogling To-Die-For. On the one hand stood Life, alternately jeering and hypnotic, on the other, bunched lines with. . .footnotes! What connection did they have? Dead Poets, e.g. Heart and mind were elsewhere, soul another word. Hokey one, at that. Occasionally, a snippet of verse would seep in and give pause, but it would be years before poetry grabbed hold and refused to let go.. But thanks to poets dead and incredibly, deliciously, outrageously alive, we are now making discoveries about ourselves and our world in and through poems that are ours by birth and adoption. Poets we are lucky enough to know sometimes honor us by commenting on our poetry. And we learn. Sometimes they honor us more by asking our opinion. Learning multiplied and sweetened.

“I have never been one to withhold my opinion.”

Forgive the levity. But poetry doesn't have to be serious, does it? Can be almost anything it wants.

Like us.

copyright 2003 PHYLLIS GREEN

SARA CLAYTOR

Dancing Towards the Sun

If you dance under clouds like gray fish scales,
you may fall under a spell.
If you dance beneath a salamander moon,
you may find intense love.
But if you dance on the edge of imagination,
you can hear the tinkle of oriental
wind chimes on a calm day,
perceive drops of water on magnolia leaves
like spattered wet paint.

As our minds stretch and grope,
side-stepping into creative bogs,
somewhere caterpillars sprout wings,
spiders swish through dried leaves,
ravens extend talons into bitter winds;
extraordinary, universal statements.

We ordinary ones waltz and shuffle
on our thin, ethereal railings,
pining to shatter the sky, fling words
into its vortex, scratch messages
on eternity's dome.

copyright SARA CLAYTOR