A reasonable question might be, “why poetry?”—when much of the world has access, for images, to gorgeous video. For emotion, in reliable surges, we have access to a range of music recorded and live. For information and opinion, an electronic social space extends its clamoring, infinite marketplace. Given such abundance, why this ancient practice of artful words, on the scale of a human voice?
Those last words, “the scale of a human voice,” answer the question.
For me, and for this course, the answer is precisely in the human scale of this art: intimately, as each person imagines saying the words of a poem, or actually gives voice to those words, the poem takes place. The meanings and feelings and sounds inhabit that person. As the old formula goes, the poem gets under your skin.
Poetry is uniquely on a human scale. Its material is language, the language used every day for all sorts of practical purposes, and its medium is each individual person’s mind and voice. The poem doesn’t convince me in the way a piece of brilliant rhetoric or a great speech might do; it gives me another kind of conviction: a conviction that this is the way to say something I feel.
That feeling—a kind of physical as well as intellectual sensation that these are the right words—made me fall in love with poetry when I was quite young. It motivates Singing School, the book that is a central recommended text for this course.
In a contemporary culture of brilliant art on a mass scale and celebrated performances available to tens of millions, through digital technology, there is a special urgency to the lyrical art that takes place in any one person’s bodily voice. That voice is not necessarily the voice of the poet, or the voice of a skilled actor, but any reader’s. It may not even necessarily be the reader’s actual voice, but imagined: a reader hearing the poem in the mind’s ear.
The best demonstration I know of this principle is in the Favorite Poem Project videos. Having stated it in a general way, I’ll give an example, with a short poem:
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blue-black cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
The last two lines of this poem by Robert Hayden (1913–1980) have stayed in my memory. By saying them to myself, inwardly, or actually pronouncing them, I feel a certain, specific excitement and solace, regret and victory. Like repetition in a song, the repeated phrase “What did I know, what did I know,” intensifies a feeling. That feeling is developed and extended by pausing after the first “know” and continuing after the second “know” that does not pause but instead spills over into the object of knowing: the poem’s unforgettable last line.
When I say the poem to myself, I’m aware that much of the language is slightly more formal than my normal way of speaking, or thinking. For instance, the “No one” of “No one ever thanked him” is not what I would say. I would probably say “nobody ever thanked him.” Similarly, in the line “and polished my good shoes as well” (a line that often makes me feel like crying), I would probably say “and polished my good shoes too.”
It’s not just the part-rhyme with “he’d call” that makes “as well” more expressive than “too” would be, as “No one” is more expressive than “nobody” would be, for this poem’s feeling. The rhyme is part of it, but the little, slight, almost invisible touches of formality in the poem, contrasting with the simplicity of things like “the rooms were warm,” have an appropriate coolness that gives the poem an additional authority, moving me in a way that completely colloquial or warmer language might not.
For me, that slight formality, a little sense of ritual in a mostly plain-spoken poem, reaches its fulfillment in the heartbreaking, triumphant last word: “offices.” What a cold word. Like a sharp icicle, it penetrates the conflicts and ambivalences of love, including love in a family, love firmly tied into the chronic angers of a house.
It has been said that rhetoric is for an argument with the world, while poetry is for an argument with oneself. When I say to myself the words of “Those Winter Sundays,” I feel that kind of conflict and ambivalence, fear and love, muteness and expressiveness. That web of feelings is in the exact words of Hayden’s poem, and it is in me.
—RP