Poetry’s Soulful Lollygag
Kevin Stein
Poetry rewards patience. One wonders whether, in this culture of quantum speed, poetry will ever again enjoy a broad public audience. This, after all, is an age seduced by velocity. This is the era of cell phones, instant messaging, the Internet, and twenty-four hour cable news.
I do know, however, that in my travels around the state, I encounter many people, legions, if you will, who yearn for what gifts poetry might bring them. Primary among those gifts is license to enjoy a kind of soulful lollygag. What I mean here is permission to dawdle, to dilly-dally, to risk wasting time as a means of investing in the spirit, the mind, and the body. In fact, poetry offers readers a way to step momentarily out of time and to discover in a poem, as Frost so famously says, what they didn’t know they knew.
The best poems proffer us a portal to the self. There we may well see who we are and what we might become. There, if we’re lucky, we may also come across the intersection between self and other, the crossing of the private and the public that enables us to live an enriched personal as well as communal life. Reading a poem we somewhat paradoxically engage the world we left behind in our reading. Writing a poem is, as René Char suggests, “the contribution of the creature to creation.” Of all living things, we are the only ones who make something out of nothing, who add to creation our own little creations.
As there are varieties of music ranging from bluegrass to rock to classical, as there are modes of painting as various as landscape and portrait and abstract expressionism, there are innumerable ways to write a poem. You need not like them all. You surely don’t like every painting you see or every piece of music you hear. Over time, with attention and exposure, you pick your favorites. This, we call taste. This, we call opinion. With still more time and thought, your preferences may indeed become more sophisticated. Nothing living in this world remains in stasis. How boring if it did.
Learning to read or to listen to poetry is itself an art form. I agree with Emerson when he says, “As there is creative writing, there is also creative reading.” No poem exists alone. It needs a poet and a reader or listener to breathe its air. You need not understand everything about a poem to enjoy its experience. You probably don’t understand every brushstroke of a painting or every note of a musical piece, but in totality, these arts move you. It is the same with poems. Let them wash over you — enjoy the music and images a poem evokes, the inarticulate notions that arrive in you first as pleasure well before they become identifiable as idea or emotion. Poems are events, not stories about events. In that way, poems stay subtly with you, a kind of poetic memory. Like the piano you heard sifting through a hotel room wall years ago, poetry is a song that lingers and reappears in your most quiet and unexpected moments.
