Six Thoughts About Poetry

By far the best poem to share with people who don't like poetry is Failing and Flying, by Jack Gilbert. I have never seen any other poem connect so much with so many people on first reading. Honestly the highest-value move right now is to stop reading this post and go read that poem.

I once heard Seamus Heaney at a recital and he read each poem twice – as in, he'd finish a poem and then immediately read it again. He said he was copying this off some other famous poet, presumably William Butler Yeats. It was weird but also truly a good experience – the first read situates you, big picture, and in the second read you hear the details.

When I was in high school I would memorize poems to the point where I now have probably 20 poems lodged in my brain for life. I no longer know how I did it, I have tried again since and largely failed to remember anything. Maybe the brain-plasticity stuff is real, or maybe I've just gotten lazy, my guess is the second.

I do think poem-memorization is an immensely valuable practice, it embeds a particular music into the language of your thoughts.

Probably unsurprisingly, highly rhyme-y poems are easier to memorize; perhaps less-obviously, having a clear progression and narrative in the poem also helps a lot. So e.g. Robert Frost's sonnets go down easy, and Milton's On His Blindness (extra fun if you do the voices), and some Carol Ann Duffy: all have strong rhymes and clear storylines.

But some of the most beloved poems, like Wild Geese, are hard to memorize because many of the lines could plausibly be flipped, which adds to the cognitive burden, and this is also a problem for some lovely structured rhyming poems, like Missing Dates.

I guess my point is that not every poem needs to be memorized, and if you're struggling with one poem maybe try another.

I am broadly of the opinion that most aesthetic experiences should be judged by their peaks not their averages, and that very few artists can consistently produce outstanding work.

E.g. I used to be disappointed when I saw a new book by a "favourite author", and inevitably discovered that I didn't like it half as much as the book I fell in love with them for; now I accept that the meaning of "favorite author" is just "person who has ever written one great book," not "person who consistently writes great books."

The same goes for restaurants: a great restaurant is a restaurant that has at least one exceptional dish, and I should not expect their other dishes to be exceptional, and some of their other dishes will be actively bad.

My point is, this all goes even more so for poetry. I do not enjoy most poems in most poetry books; even an exceptional poetry collection might only have a small handful of poems I love. But it's those poems that the book exists for, and possibly that we exist for.

(Unsurprisingly, my favorite single poetry collection is Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires. But I still don't like most of the poems in it, and some of the poems I love only in parts).

I hate the standard Poetry Reading Voice, it feels so fake to me. I wonder if there was one poet once who everyone else is imitating, someone whose natural reading voice had that slow insistent lilt to it, and they were super charismatic and incredible to listen to. And then everyone else tried to copy that voice but now they're facsimiling facsimiles, and it's like kids dressing up in their parent's clothes, it's bathetic.

Someone pointed out once that we think of poetry as niche and unpopular, but the most popular commercial music of the 1990s to 2010s was spoken word poetry (i.e. rap). I don't know, I think that's pretty great.