{"id":36,"date":"2016-06-23T15:42:22","date_gmt":"2016-06-23T19:42:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/?p=36"},"modified":"2021-10-28T20:41:49","modified_gmt":"2021-10-29T00:41:49","slug":"introduction-difficulty-and-pleasure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/introduction-difficulty-and-pleasure\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction: Difficulty and Pleasure"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A reasonable question might be, “why poetry?”\u2014when 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?<\/p>\n

Those last words, \u201cthe scale of a human voice,\u201d answer the question.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s mind and voice. The poem doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

That feeling\u2014a kind of physical as well as intellectual sensation that these are the right words\u2014made me fall in love with poetry when I was quite young. It motivates Singing School<\/em>, the book that is a central recommended text for this course.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s bodily voice. That voice is not necessarily the voice of the poet, or the voice of a skilled actor, but any reader\u2019s. It may not even necessarily be the reader\u2019s actual voice, but imagined: a reader hearing the poem in the mind\u2019s ear.<\/p>\n

The best demonstration I know of this principle is in the\u00a0Favorite Poem Project videos. Having stated it in a general way, I\u2019ll give an example, with a short poem:<\/p>\n

Those Winter Sundays<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sundays too my father got up early
\nand put his clothes on in the blue-black cold,
\nthen with cracked hands that ached
\nfrom labor in the weekday weather made
\nbanked fires blaze.\u00a0 No one ever thanked him.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
\nWhen the rooms were warm, he\u2019d call,
\nand slowly I would rise and dress,
\nfearing the chronic angers of that house,<\/p>\n

Speaking indifferently to him,
\nwho had driven out the cold
\nand polished my good shoes as well.
\nWhat did I know, what did I know
\nof love\u2019s austere and lonely offices?<\/p>\n

The last two lines of this poem by\u00a0Robert Hayden (1913\u20131980) 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 \u201cWhat did I know, what did I know,\u201d intensifies a feeling. That feeling is developed and extended by pausing after the first \u201cknow\u201d and continuing after the second \u201cknow\u201d that does not pause but instead spills over into the object of knowing: the poem\u2019s unforgettable last line.<\/p>\n

When I say the poem to myself, I\u2019m aware that much of the language is slightly more formal than my normal way of speaking, or thinking. For instance, the \u201cNo one\u201d of \u201cNo one ever thanked him\u201d is not what I would say. I would probably say \u201cnobody ever thanked him.” Similarly, in the line \u201cand polished my good shoes as well\u201d (a line that often makes me feel like crying), I would probably say \u201cand polished my good shoes too.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just the part-rhyme with \u201che\u2019d call\u201d that makes \u201cas well\u201d more expressive than \u201ctoo\u201d would be, as \u201cNo one\u201d is more expressive than \u201cnobody\u201d would be, for this poem\u2019s 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 \u201cthe rooms were warm,\u201d have an appropriate coolness that gives the poem an additional authority, moving me in a way that completely colloquial or warmer language might not.<\/p>\n

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: \u201coffices.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cThose Winter Sundays,\u201d 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\u2019s poem, and it is in me.<\/p>\n

\u2014RP<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A reasonable question might be, “why poetry?”\u2014when 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12121"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":412,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions\/412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}