Poetry Spinning

Thanks Dan - I don’t know if you all heard the understory to that poem, and Dan I hope you don’t mind me sharing what is after all a good story.  There are annual parties in Prague, and probably worldwide, to honor Bobby Burns, and at these parties the guests are asked to bring a poem to recite.  I suppose that most will simply offer (or not so simply, having to memorize with all th’inflections) one of Burns’s own, but Dan wanted to be different and write his own poem, not to a louse or a mouse but to a grouse.  He asked for my feedback, and I suggested, way too sheepishly and before seeing the final product, that he could still take the easy route and sing his version of Danny Boy, hoping no one would complain that it was an Irish song.  Anyway, Good for ye, brother, for bein’ bold!

I am taking Dan’s encouragement to submit at least one monthly entry to the Symposia.  I don’t have a poem this time around (and remember, fellow bloggers, poems are not the prerequisite anyway), but I do want to share how I have been influenced by poetry on several levels lately.  First, I have to tell you all about a new phone/ipad app that the Poetry Foundation has put out.  I can’t even begin to describe it, but it uses a “spin” button to put random poetry in front of you like nothing I’d ever imagined.  Check it out at  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/mobile/, and don’t be intimidated by the 35Mb download.  It takes a little time and available memory, but it’s worth it.  I might even actually finally subscribe to Poetry Magazine because of this.

Second, I am inspired by Kirsten, who was recently frustrated by her LA teacher’s admonition not to beat poems to death in trying to interpret them.  I sympathized but ultimately took her teacher’s side, partly because I had just been reading and trying to memorize Mary Olver’s Hawk, a poem that, as it turns out, is specifically about that.  I won’t repeat the poem here, being recently aware of potential SOPA violations, but the poet sees a hawk and starts to romanticize, then has to remind herself that this is “heaven’s fistful of death and destruction.”  But the hawk looks so remarkable perched on a dead tree that she starts to think of “the tree, the cave, the white lily of the resurrection.” And that’s when the hawk proceeds to do what hawks do.  But this, too, is not what Oliver wrote.  You have to read the poem yourself and appreciate her struggles and reminders and disappointments, all of which are part of the poem.  As Frost said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”

Nonetheless, Kirsten’s teacher inspired me to try to interpret, yet not beat to death, one of Frost‘s own poems.  I picked “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be The Same,” whose full meaning had erstwhile escaped me.  I think I have a grasp of it now, but only after looking at the particular meaning of each word —and yet the poem is still alive!  Try just the first five lines (SOPA will not reach fair use) for yourselves, and ask yourselves, who is “he”?  Where is “there”?  How many voices?  What is an “oversound”?  And how much is considered before the poet even gets to Eve?

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.

Third influence comes from Andrew, who has memorized a four line poem, which came to him while using Bartlett’s to compose an American Revolution essay.  The teacher made him pick a different quote, as he was supposed to be taking the Tory’s side, but this time I think the teacher is full of beans.  SOPA will not reach noncopyrighted poems (generally those before about 1923), so here it is, W.B. Yeats’s The Great Day:

Hurrah for revolution and cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places but the lash goes on.

Well, that’s my spin for January.  Here’s to hearing more!