OT: "The Writer's Almanac", poetry in general

[Tom]

Garrison Keillor comes on the radio in the morning and does a birthday roll call, bios somebody significant and then reads a poem. I enjoy it, driving in to work, and I listen closely to the poems he reads but I don't get it.

I thought poetry would have me tearing up and snuffling or tearing up and joyful or give me that weird creepy feeling I get when I read Flannery O'Connor. What he reads doesn't do anything.

I thought he'd pick good poetry. Is it that his taste is refined and mine isn't or is he picking bad poetry?

What the hell is poetry, anyway?

[fiamme red]

http://www.poems.com/keilaugu.htm

[OldDog]

I don't know what good poetry is because I'm an unrefined, uneducated kind of mutt who pee's on hydrants humming to "Who let the Dogs out!". But I have enjoyed Garrisons skits and diddy's over the years and even went to see him twice at the local theatre. Once was a skit type show that was really entertaining, the other, a poetry session that found me nodding off...

[David Kirk]

I listen to writer's almanac every morning and I love it. Some times I "get it" and some times I don't but I always enjoy it.

Dave

[spiderman]

in some robert service...
here's one i like
about not belonging/not getting it...
i know it hits me right between the eyes.
anyone who lived out in the wild of the yukon
and wrote poems from the heart
...well, i think you'll get it!
and i would be so bold
to say that the poem relates to cycling...
...fast vs slow
winning the lifelong race, etc...
it's a stretch
but not tooo far??




THE MEN THAT DON'T FIT IN

There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
They say: "Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make!"
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones
Who win the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;
He's a man who won't fit in.

[roman meal]

Our local station plays the almanac at 6:30 in the morning. Besides the poetry, it's a good reminder of how late I am in the morning schedule of things. But, and I guess it's the best thing, it always gives me three minutes to do nothing but listen. And I think I certainly understand today's poem, at least:

Poem: "Comeback" by Tess Gallagher from Dear Ghosts, © Graywolf Press. Reprinted with permission.

Comeback

My father loved first light.
He would sit alone
at the yellow formica table
in the kitchen with his coffee cup
and sip and look out
over the strait. Now,
in what could be
the end of my life, or worse,
the life of someone I love, I too
am addicted to slow sweet beginnings.
First bird call. Wings
in silhouette. How the steeples
of the evergreens make a selvage
for the gaunt emerging sky.

My three loves are far away
in other countries,
and one is even under
this dew-bright ground
where the little herds
of jittery quail peck
and scurry for their lives.

My father picks up his
cup. Light is sifting in
like a gloam of certainty
over the water. He knows
something there in the half light
he can't know any other way.

And now I know it with him: so much
is joining us in the dawn
that no one can ever be parted.
It steals over us because we left
the warm beds of our dreams
to sit beside what rises.
I think he wants to stay there
forever, my captain, gazing but not
expecting, while the world
begins, and, in a stark silent calling,
won't tell anyone what it's for.

[Tom]

roman meal: I missed that one. Maybe I need to read the poem instead of having it read to me? I don't just read it straight through, I go back and forth over a phrase or stanza. That probably drives the poets nuts but it's like looking at something beautiful from a couple of sides to really appreciate it.

Ah, Robert Service. I used to be able to recite The Cremation of Sam McGee but I'd have to have a prompter to do it these days.

[roman meal]

I like hearing the poem read aloud, and then I like to read it myself, too. I also read over certain lines again, and "hear" them again in a new way, sometimes, if something caught me. I don't think there is any prescribed way to read a poem, except, perhaps, how not to as noted in this gem by Billy Collins:

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside a poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch

I want them to water ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

[Moveitfred]

What the hell is poetry, anyway?
Poetry is about wheelbarrows and rain and chickens. Beyond that, it don't matter. Watch tv.