If you have a demon of grief or fear or anger lurking, the best exorcism is writing a poem. Psychologists and artists alike urge keeping a journal. The value is proven. Writing a poem that satisfies you, that you think another person can 'get,' does the same thing. If you want to express the inexpressible, turn it into a poem.
A lot of professors and writers sneer at the 'confessional' poetry that gained such a following thirty years ago. So what? Pick up an anthology and find the poems in it that speak to you. They’ll be the ones that say what you feel. Contemporary poets know this and they refuse to hide the experiences that can find resonance with other human beings. They write about not only the delight in the sound of raindrops falling but the agonies of watching a loved one leave or the hideous toll of cruelty.
Until very recently, anyone could identify a poem just by looking at the page. When we were in school, unless someone brought up William Carlos Williams or E. E. Cummings, we could tell a poem when we heard it. If it didn’t rhyme, it sang all the same — lilting with recognizable poetic syllables like iambs and troches. Nowadays, even without the traditional visual signals, poetic diction is still unmistakable in a good poem regardless of style and even if it can’t be scanned like traditional verse.
Along with the visual arts, changes began to seep into poetry with the 20th Century. Here came, among others, the Beats. Not only did they espouse the earthy, even profane language of the disenfranchised and the poor, they ranted and shocked. And many of them got onto literary lists in spite of their slanderous performances, like Allen Ginsberg and Robert Bly, writing poetry of activism as well as spirituality or reverence for everyday things.
In the late fifties, Harvard University Press published a book by George Biddle — a painter and scholar — discussing esthetics, The Yes and No of Contemporary Art. An Artist's Evolution. While most of the material is applied to painting, a lot of it is equally useful for evaluating any art form. Biddle pointed out that in the 19th and 20th centuries’ surge of new artists adopting revolutionary positions on the proper purposes of art, conventions of beauty were, in some views, vandalized out of all recognition. A great deal of the best-known and most admired visual art was created with social commentary at its heart instead of patriotism, religion, or patronage.
Biddle said, "…all great civilizations and all great art show a healthy balance between the outward-looking preoccupation with the visual world and the inward spiritual need." It’s the spiritual need that seems to have taken over the consciousness of many, if not most, contemporary poets.
Driven by this need, I’ve begun to read poetry again, even buy books of it, because I’ve begun to try to write it again for the first time in over thirty years. Of course, therapy is involved, which reveals my bias for the poetry whose language opens those small, often concealed doors in the reader’s mind that disclose places and sensations and even insights that would likely never show up in prose.
A poem requires the cooperation of the reader to make its way into the place where it can provide pleasure, revelation, connection. There is so much more in a good poem than its words, which is one reason its words take on so much more significance than the same ones might in a declarative sentence. Choosing the right ones is a delightful challenge.
Try to write a poem, and discover that it will spring from some place with which you’re profoundly familiar or which points to realms you did not know you had missed. Many are doubtless necessary therapy for their authors, like one poet’s collection about the painful breakup of his marriage because of his wife’s mental illness. Robert Burns' choice of a flea or John Updike’s recognition of mortality demonstrate there is nothing that will not fit into a poem.
Indirection in a poem can be like trying to see a dim star. Trying to look straight at it ensures that you cannot find it, but if someone can lead your eye in the correct direction near it, you will see it. A good poem, no matter when it was written or in what form it is presented, does the same thing. It shows the reader something she knows is there, but perhaps cannot bring into focus.
Go ahead and try it; you may find you like doing it.
©2011 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com
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