Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, amateur linguist and professional slacker. And this week, we're learning to read poetry again.
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Sometime in the early 2000s, a friend came back to Japan with a bag full of bootlegged VHS tapes of Def Poetry Jam, a spin-off of the wildly popular Def Comedy Jam, featuring poets, rappers, singers, and writers doing spoken word poetry on stage in New York. It was awesome. Spoken word had just come to the forefront of culture and was staking its claim as a legitimate art form separate from both written poetry and musical performance. We were into it.
Johnette Napolitano’s Vowel Moment set Bukowski’s Singing is Fire to Music. It is one of my favorite songs of all time.
But it's not like we were new to poetry. We had all studied poetry in school and all of us liked it well enough to be able to name a few favorites, maybe even quote something, and we had all had a turn at writing it, usually at the behest of junior high school English teachers. But this was different. The poets on stage in DPJ stormed through the crowd and onto the stage, bringing fire and righteousness with them. Saul Williams brought legitimacy to the enterprise and ld school represented through the likes of 60s beat poets and jazz performers while the new school brought forth a cavalcade of future stars like Kanye West and Dave Chappelle.
I had heard, somewhere, a tape of Charles Bukowski reading one of his poems at a gathering of legendary beat poets in a San Francisco book store in the 60s. The words sent shivers up and down my spine but the performance... I knew that Bukowski, nearing 50 and in pain, never meant to be a performer. He barely wanted his poems read, much less spoken aloud, by himself, in front of an audience. I knew that because Buk's words were the first poems to really anchor themselves into my psyche.
Robert Frost and e.e. cummings had made my school years fun with their wit, evocative imagery, and, most importantly, easily analyzed and reported on brevity. But I found Bukowski in college, after a break-up, after moving into a new apartment, after going through all those life-changing stages of the first year away from home. And even though I knew that Bukowski was problematic at best and a raving, misogynistic, alcoholic, wreck at worst, some of his poems still spoke to me. They told me that it was okay to have no idea what I wanted to do or to be and that it was okay to wake up feeling simultaneously optimistic and ready to burn the world down. His words told me that life was going to suck, there was nothing to be done about it, so let go and enjoy the ride.
Taylor Mali’s What Teacher’s Make. Send this to every teacher you know.
I'm going to be 45 in a couple of months. I find it a lot harder to identify with a lot of the poems I liked when I was 21. (Which is as it should be, to be honest.) And, you know, I don't really read much poetry these days. Just not my thing. But. Two of my favorite newsletters - Austin Kleon's and Lena Olin's - both regularly close with a poem. I generally skim them and move on. Not my thing. Except that I found a few of those old Def Poetry Jam clips (thanks YouTube algorithm!) and they still spoke to me. Some of them anyway. So I dug a little deeper into some of the poetry I used to enjoy and found that some of it still really speaks to me. I'm getting back into it.
It's hard to build a new habit. Especially one that has a lot of self-reflection built-in. What themes do I care about? What is speaking to me? Why? These are all good questions to ask yourself and these are good questions that can be brought on, suddenly, without realizing, while reading a poem.
I said in the intro that this week we're learning to read poetry again and I should make at least one thing clear - there's no formula for reading a poem. More importantly is that there's no wrong way to read one. The very existence of the poem itself nullifies any attempt to codify a set of rules around it. Poets might make rules for themselves as a way to delimit a space in which to create, but the poet can never tell the reader how to read the poem. It defeats the purpose.
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Stay safe, stay strong. Learn something.
Joel