A question of form.
Since last midsummer I have been reading a Mary Oliver poem a day as part of our daily meditation. They are beautiful, mystical, and a poetic window into the profound truth which truly connecting with nature opens for us. The subject of each is resonant, and the words are elegantly and precisely chiseled — but the question I have with certain pieces is are they actually poetry?
Some are slabs of prose without pretence; and others sentences broken up into lines somewhat arbitrarily. What is the appropriate term for these? Proems? Poetic Writing? The word Prosody would suit, but already has a different meaning.
From the dawn of time—when verse /lyrics /poetry meant the same thing metre—rhythm and rhyme were coterminous :: because that is what assisted oral memory to capture and retain narrative. Poetry is stronger when it arbours of meaning are welded together ny rhyme, which adds an element of form /abstraction that cements the words into one's brain.
Who can forget this couplet of Updike:
Cherish your work, take pleasure in your task,
For doing's the one reward a man dare ask.
I read it 30 years ago, and yet it remains fresh because the elegance of craft and symmetry in the form chiseled the words into my mind.
Or Pope‘s acid sketch of Marlborough:
… Or see him old and sunk in years,
Lost in unmeaning, unrepenting tears.
A verdict on 'achievement' that has constantly recurred to me since I first read it 55 years ago because of Pope's jeweled phraseology.
But what do I actually remember of any of Mary Oliver’s poetry I’ve spent the better part of a year reading? A beautiful fragrance of thought and the lonely clarity of a wounded healer seeking truth through alignment with nature – but actual turns of phrase? Nothing. This sentence from her poem At Blackwater Pond is typical.
Every year
everything
I have ever learnt
in my life time
leads back to this: the fires
and the black rivers of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
It’s beautiful, resonant and poetic. But is it actually poetry? I had an english teacher who expressed the cynical view that poetry was just prose broken up into lines with the words in the wrong order. And certainly the first part of that observation applies to Mary Oliver, albeit the words are in the right order! I realise of course that MO pared away every unnecessary or careless word to arrive at a perfect distillation of the experience she wished to convey. That is the epitome of her craft and her quiet gift to the world. No doubt she felt that any kind of literary artifice would undermine the authenticity of her direct simplicity. Yet I do regret that she didn’t occasionally engage with form—like her heroine Edna St Vincent Millay, tho it was a different age—as I think that extra energy would’ve come from the wrestling.
---
Later I came upon this piece of Rumi and suddenly understood what Mary Oliver was about.
What in your life is calling you,
When all the noise is silenced,
The meetings adjourned...
The lists laid aside ––
And the Wild Iris blooms
By itself
In the dark forest... ?
What is drawing your soul?
I now see that Mary Oliver uses her ‘word camera’ to record /evoke the numinous reality behind the natural world. I also saw a picture of her with Coleman Barks, two old bent figures walking down a street in a fond embrace. This Rumi ‘poem’ does exactly what MO does, walk you through a thought-picture and then twist it so you catch a glimpse of your soul at the end.
So whether it is (/not) called poatry doesn’t matter. Nor can Oliver’s exquisite simplicity be blamed for imitators (and english teachers) who copy her surfaces but never plumb her depths. Yet the irony remains that while wrestling with form is probably seen by such folk as inhibiting and traducing the spontaneity of their inspiration – the irony is that it might well be the mordant that preserves it.
In their disregard of craft it’s as if many contemporary poets are saying there is no Ars Longa, no tradition, there is only Vita Brevis. This is not an accusation that can be laid at MO's door, who is exemplarily conscious of deep time and of perennial meanings.
Is this just old man's talk? A pedantic nostalgia for the aesthetics of a forgotten age? If it is, then it’s because tradition /continuity matter to what Ezra Pound called The Great Bass – by which I think he meant the Low Frequency Oscillation of culture. The persistence of rhyme remained an echo of literature’s primordial past when strophic form was the sharpest arrow in the storyteller’s quiver of oral enchantment, and conferred majesty and magic on poem and bard alike.
Is anyone awed by poetry these days? Performance poets certainly enchant their audience—and it's no accident they use rhyme and metre in the most traditional way—but do they awe them? Nowadays we’re distrustful of both majesty and magic—while we crave them—and it's deeply regretable that so much modern poetry has casually discarded one of the fundamental elements of its own numinous power.
Since last midsummer I have been reading a Mary Oliver poem a day as part of our daily meditation. They are beautiful, mystical, and a poetic window into the profound truth which truly connecting with nature opens for us. The subject of each is resonant, and the words are elegantly and precisely chiseled — but the question I have with certain pieces is are they actually poetry?
Some are slabs of prose without pretence; and others sentences broken up into lines somewhat arbitrarily. What is the appropriate term for these? Proems? Poetic Writing? The word Prosody would suit, but already has a different meaning.
From the dawn of time—when verse /lyrics /poetry meant the same thing metre—rhythm and rhyme were coterminous :: because that is what assisted oral memory to capture and retain narrative. Poetry is stronger when it arbours of meaning are welded together ny rhyme, which adds an element of form /abstraction that cements the words into one's brain.
Who can forget this couplet of Updike:
Cherish your work, take pleasure in your task,
For doing's the one reward a man dare ask.
I read it 30 years ago, and yet it remains fresh because the elegance of craft and symmetry in the form chiseled the words into my mind.
Or Pope‘s acid sketch of Marlborough:
… Or see him old and sunk in years,
Lost in unmeaning, unrepenting tears.
A verdict on 'achievement' that has constantly recurred to me since I first read it 55 years ago because of Pope's jeweled phraseology.
But what do I actually remember of any of Mary Oliver’s poetry I’ve spent the better part of a year reading? A beautiful fragrance of thought and the lonely clarity of a wounded healer seeking truth through alignment with nature – but actual turns of phrase? Nothing. This sentence from her poem At Blackwater Pond is typical.
Every year
everything
I have ever learnt
in my life time
leads back to this: the fires
and the black rivers of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
It’s beautiful, resonant and poetic. But is it actually poetry? I had an english teacher who expressed the cynical view that poetry was just prose broken up into lines with the words in the wrong order. And certainly the first part of that observation applies to Mary Oliver, albeit the words are in the right order! I realise of course that MO pared away every unnecessary or careless word to arrive at a perfect distillation of the experience she wished to convey. That is the epitome of her craft and her quiet gift to the world. No doubt she felt that any kind of literary artifice would undermine the authenticity of her direct simplicity. Yet I do regret that she didn’t occasionally engage with form—like her heroine Edna St Vincent Millay, tho it was a different age—as I think that extra energy would’ve come from the wrestling.
---
Later I came upon this piece of Rumi and suddenly understood what Mary Oliver was about.
What in your life is calling you,
When all the noise is silenced,
The meetings adjourned...
The lists laid aside ––
And the Wild Iris blooms
By itself
In the dark forest... ?
What is drawing your soul?
I now see that Mary Oliver uses her ‘word camera’ to record /evoke the numinous reality behind the natural world. I also saw a picture of her with Coleman Barks, two old bent figures walking down a street in a fond embrace. This Rumi ‘poem’ does exactly what MO does, walk you through a thought-picture and then twist it so you catch a glimpse of your soul at the end.
So whether it is (/not) called poatry doesn’t matter. Nor can Oliver’s exquisite simplicity be blamed for imitators (and english teachers) who copy her surfaces but never plumb her depths. Yet the irony remains that while wrestling with form is probably seen by such folk as inhibiting and traducing the spontaneity of their inspiration – the irony is that it might well be the mordant that preserves it.
In their disregard of craft it’s as if many contemporary poets are saying there is no Ars Longa, no tradition, there is only Vita Brevis. This is not an accusation that can be laid at MO's door, who is exemplarily conscious of deep time and of perennial meanings.
Is this just old man's talk? A pedantic nostalgia for the aesthetics of a forgotten age? If it is, then it’s because tradition /continuity matter to what Ezra Pound called The Great Bass – by which I think he meant the Low Frequency Oscillation of culture. The persistence of rhyme remained an echo of literature’s primordial past when strophic form was the sharpest arrow in the storyteller’s quiver of oral enchantment, and conferred majesty and magic on poem and bard alike.
Is anyone awed by poetry these days? Performance poets certainly enchant their audience—and it's no accident they use rhyme and metre in the most traditional way—but do they awe them? Nowadays we’re distrustful of both majesty and magic—while we crave them—and it's deeply regretable that so much modern poetry has casually discarded one of the fundamental elements of its own numinous power.
