Monthly Archives: August 2023

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The Most Precious Gift: Declamation

poetry reading poetry

These days, gift-giving is too much about cursors and clicks to cart. Material goods bought with plastic shipped to porches by UPS.

You don’t need to be a poet, however, to give a better gift to someone you love: declamation. This came to mind while reading the May 2020 issue of The Atlantic. In a piece called “Being Friends with Philip Roth” by Benjamin Taylor, the latter mentions Roth’s 74th birthday party.

Apparently Roth turned to the assembled guests and, casual as all get-out, asked if anyone cared to recite a poem from memory. As if that was still done. As if each guest had brought a poem gift-wrapped in their brain pan.

To kick things off, Roth recited a Mark Strand poem: “Keeping Things Whole.” According to Taylor, Roth “then looks at me as if to say, ‘Your serve.'” Luckily, Taylor was able to return volley. He recited Robert Frost’s lesser known poem “I Could Give All to Time.”

Roth was so impressed that he brought it up on the phone the next morning: “Those rhymes!” he said to Taylor. “It’s as if nature made them.”

And, at the time, I thought, how cool. Shouldn’t this happen more often? Not just between writers of poetry, but between readers of poetry, too?

Anyway, it was enough to set me to the task of memorizing both, starting with the easier—the Strand piece. So here’s to Philip and Benjamin.

Oh. And Mark and Robert, too!

 

Keeping Things Whole
Mark Strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

 

I Could Give All to Time
Robert Frost

To Time it never seems that he is brave
To set himself against the peaks of snow
To lay them level with the running wave,
Nor is he overjoyed when they lie low,
But only grave, contemplative and grave.

What now is inland shall be ocean isle,
Then eddies playing round a sunken reef
Like the curl at the corner of a smile;
And I could share Time’s lack of joy or grief
At such a planetary change of style.

I could give all to Time except – except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,
And what I would not part with I have kept.

Both God & the Devil Are in the Details

poetry poetry books word choice writing

kooser book

Years ago, when I decided to dip a toe in the poetry waters, I purchased a book that has since become a favorite due to its practicality: Ted Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Manual. I occasionally go back and flip through it anew, amazed how the old appears new again and the read appears unread again thanks to time. That’s part of the book’s practicality, I think, and why it has a picture of well-used tools in a toolbox on its cover.

One of my favorite chapters is #9: “Working with Detail.” It may come ninth in the book, but its message is central not only to poets but to writers in general: Be specific. Kooser doesn’t leave it at that, however. Being specific alone isn’t good enough.

Instead of discussing the value of detail alone, Kooser promotes the unexpected detail. After excerpting Thea S. Kuticka’s poem, “Newcastle Bar & Grill,” as an exemplar, Kooser goes into teacher mode:

“Notice the value of unexpected, unpredictable detail, how it lends authenticity to the poem.

“If I were to ask each of you in turn to provide, from your imaginations, one or two details from a scene like this one, I’d expect you to come up with the obvious ones: cigarette butts in the ashtrays, a clock over the counter, the smell of grease, the clink of dishes, and so on, and soon, as we added detail upon detail, we would have assembled a kind of Norman Rockwell bar and grill. But it wouldn’t feel quite real because we would have built it from the predictable details, from our imaginations. There would be little about our imaginary scene to convince the viewer that any of us had ever been in this specific bar and grill. But if one of us dropped in just one unpredictable detail, say a cardboard box covered with Christmas paper, sitting on the end of the counter and filled with carburetor parts, the whole scene would gain in authenticity because somebody viewing our assembled scene would think, ‘Well, those poets must have been there, all right, to have seen that box on the counter.'”

Kooser goes on to share an anecdote about feedback he once received on an early poem. It came from the poet Robert Bly (note to self: How do these beginners get such established poets to read, much less critique, their drafts? Must find out!). Bly responded to Kooser’s poem by writing, quite bluntly, “You’re just making this up.”

Kooser elaborates: “He meant that I’d created the scene and experience from my imagination, sitting in my comfortable chair under my floor lamp. What I’d put there were the predictable things, the kinds of details the imagination finds easily. The imagination makes a lousy realist; it places in its scenes only those things that it prefers to see there. Bly was encouraging me to write from life, to go out and actually experience something and then write about that while its particular and unique detail was fresh in the mind.”

From here, Kooser goes on to the importance of naming things by their actual names (think of architecture around you, for instance, and how the carpenter who builds houses can name each one while we, as poets, can probably name only a fifth of them), and this is good advice.

Still, I like the unpredictable detail advice best. Why? Because it’s a good reminder about a bad habit. Because my imagination often tries to hijack my poems, written from a chair under a light as well, and just paint the canvas in hues of “expected” and “predictable,” too. It’s easier, after all, and the first draft of least resistance.

The moral of a story? Sometimes your imagination, usually considered the hero in writing lore, can work against you. Consider it guilty until proven innocent, then. And keep your eye peeled for details that set scenes and people apart from their counterparts.