Poetry in Man's Search for Meaning

In his powerful story of survival from the Holocaust, 

Victor Frankl writes in Man's Search for Meaning:

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salva- tion of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in posi- tive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory." 

A mediation on this final line.

Frankl on PBS

Do you know any poets?

A student asked me in class the other day if I knew any poets.

Personally? I replied.

Not to name drop, but I realized I've taken for granted my experience with extraordinary poets and their poetry.

Poets may be some of the most interesting people you'll meet. They are at heart story tellers that take notice of the world around them and find the words that tend to fail us.

Look into the biographies of poets and you'll discover colorful lives that compel them to write. Contrary to the general perception of poetry as dry and dusty, I've admired the humor of poets I've met - the quick wit in conversation. I have a friend George Bilgere, a friend's professor at John Carroll. George read his poetry at my former school. Since then, we've met up a few times to talk poetry and life, telling stories and sharing laughs.




In grad school at The Bread Loaf School of English, I was fortunate to take a summer workshop for six weeks with Pulitzer Prize winning poet and Princeton Professor, Paul Muldoon. At Bread Loaf, I heard 1976 Pulitzer Prize winning poet John Ashbury read; I especially enjoyed talking with him afterward at the reception. (As poetry editor to the New Yorker, Paul Muldoon interviews Ashbury on this podcast.)

I still regret not taking poetry with David Huddle at Bread Loaf.

In college, I had a dear mentor in that was a published poet Deborah Burnham. I wish I had studied with Al Filreis; I highly recommend taking his Coursera ModPo.

Although not a poety, my mentor from high school, an English teacher and Milton scholar, is a published novelist Paul Kalkstein. Princeton undergrad and Yale grad school, Paul was also my lacrosse coach and house counselor. He may be the most influential teacher I had, even though I never had a class with him; to be honest, I was afraid of disappointing him since I knew he had high expectations.

I also regret never seeing my favorite poet Seamus Heaney, but I did study with arguably the most demanding professor at Bread Loaf, Victor Luftig of the University of Pennsylvania. Victor taught "Heaney in Context," a course that would alter my view on poetry and the teaching of poetry.

I've attended readings by former Poet Laureates Ted Kooser and Billy Collins in Cleveland.
Listen to Ted Kooser's intro below where he shares a funny story of how a young boy said he looks like a hobbit.



I enjoyed listening to Sharon Olds, 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, a few years ago at my last school. Here's Muldoon talking poetry with Olds for the New Yorker.

Another visiting poet and professor, Jay Parini, inspired this blog and furthered my exploration into poetry. As an English department, we had dinner with Jay; then, he visited my class and a creative writing class where he talked of his writing process:

“The first draft of anything I write is usually always a cliché, so I go back and try to sharpen the words,” Parini explained. “Word choice is crucial, because if you have the right noun or verb, you don’t need to hustle up a bunch of adjectives or adverbs (to make your point). I also have favorite words that I find myself using, but they are often just holding places until I can go back and find a better word to use."

As Parini suggests, understanding the importance of diction, especially the connotation of words, is vital in poetry - and in life.

Poetry is about finding the fresh words and moving beyond cliché to express ourselves. Poets bring poetry to life though the instrument of their voice. Listen to poets read their poetry - read their prose on poetry.

Lastly, I have been fortunate to have colleagues who write poetry - and I hope to have some visit a class soon.

April Fool's Day - a day late and a year later.

From the Wall Street Journal. WSJ.com

OPINION

The Poetic Justice of April 1

When was the last time you bought a contemporary book of verse? 

Yet the stuff still gets published, prizes awarded.

By JOSEPH EPSTEIN

March 31, 2013 7:04 p.m. ET

April, the poet told us, is the cruelest month. As it happens, it is also National Poetry Month, which makes its debut on April Fool's Day. And the biggest fools of all may well be those who believe that contemporary poetry matters in the least except to those who, against a high barbed-wire wall of national indifference, continue solemnly to churn it out.

Poetry in our day is in the same condition as verse drama at the beginning of the last century: an archaic practice, a dead genre, a done deal. We still have people playing the role of major poets, but only because the world seems to require a few people to play the role: "In art, in medicine, in fashion we must have new names," wrote Marcel Proust. We know the names: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich and a few others. It is only their poetry that we don't know, or can't be brought to care about.

In the room the poets come and go, / muttering, yo!, / where's the prize and what's the dough? But if I ask a literary gent or lady to quote me a single line or phrase from any of our putative major poets, they cannot do it. The magazines—the TLS, the New Yorker, Poetry and the rest—go on publishing the stuff, prize committees meet to issue awards and descant on the importance of poetry to civilization, but it is all finally an intramural game.

Like so many people of my rapidly diminishing generation, I walk around with lines and entire passages from the poetry of W.B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, and others rattling around pleasantly in my head. But nearly all the poetry written since the years those poets wrote doesn't register, resonate, ring, do any of the elevating things that poetry is supposed to, and once indeed did, do.

When was the last time you bought a book of verse by a contemporary poet? My guess is around the same time that I did—the 12th of Never, if a precise date is wanted. And this tends to be true of genuine literateurs, lovers of language and its artful deployment. W.H. Auden said that if one were born later than the 1890s one had no chance to become a major poet. (He was born in 1907 but somehow got his bulky body over the bar.) Philip Larkin, who may not have been a major poet, at least created some memorable but not necessarily newspaper-publishable lines and phrases: "They [you-know-what] you up, your mum and dad."

But otherwise the poetry game is over, kaput, fini, time, gentlemen, time. This even though reams and reams of the stuff gets published, prizes awarded, poets laureate appointed to the resounding boredom of all but those who either write or teach poetry (usually one and the same people). Years ago I wrote an essay on this subject called "Who Killed Poetry?," which stirred up beehives of poets in protest. I suggested that the academicization of poetry did a lot to help kill it; I also concluded that too much poetry was in production, with Gresham's Law relentlessly at work, in this instance the crappy driving out the second-rate. I also concluded that so many people who drifted into the writing of poetry didn't have very interesting minds: a family member dies, they saw a tree of unusual shape, a little-known Matisse painting excited them, so they take to their computers and trivialize the subject or experience by encasing it in a more or less complex contraption of verbal self-absorption currently called a poem.

I now wonder if quite as considerable a reason for the death of poetry is that the international attention span has been much reduced by so many fresh distractions, leaving fewer and fewer people who have the patience and intellectual curiosity to work out the rich complexity of a well-wrought poem—that is, if anyone is around who could actually produce one. My main point is that if any of your children or grandchildren comes to you and declares a wish to become a poet, send that child directly off to bed without any dinner, and return to your place on the couch before the television set.

Mr. Epstein is the author, with Frederic Raphael, of "Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet," published this week by Yale University Press. This op-ed is based in part on the book.

Mr. O'Brien Form VI English: National Poetry Month: Day 1

Mr. O'Brien Form VI English: National Poetry Month: Day 1:

What makes a poem a poem?

What makes a poet?



Poetry Terms Reviewed:



Ars Poetic: First Draft

John Updike's Birthday: 3.18.1932

Most mornings I like to listen to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac website. 

I added a link to this blog (see to the right).

See today's Writer's Almanac for a poem by John Updike. 

Yes, it is my favorite website because you learn about the lives of writers - plus a daily poem. 

You may have heard it on NPR read by Garrison Keillor, famous for his Prairie Home Companion.

Hopefully, you may recall Updike's "A&P" - one of the short stories from the fall that we studied.

If you're interested in writing someday, consider keeping a journal. Read below to see why.

From Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of novelist John Updike (books by this author), born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1932). He went to Harvard, where he majored in English and drew cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon (he also wrote the majority of each issue). After graduation, he got married, sold his first short story to The New Yorker, and headed off to England with his new wife. In England, Updike studied painting at Oxford University and continued to send poems and stories to The New Yorker. His work impressed E.B. and Katharine White — E.B. wrote for The New Yorker and Katharine was its fiction editor. While they were vacationing in England they visited Updike and offered him a job writing the magazine's "Talk of the Town" column. The Updikes moved back to America with their daughter, and he went to work.

His first "Talk of the Town" column was so good that the editor immediately promoted him. After that, his pieces were published verbatim instead of edited, and he earned $200 per story instead of $100. He wrote a faux-academic piece about Manhattanites' faces, another about pigeons, and for another he eavesdropped from the corner of the Biltmore Hotel's bar during college spring break. For one column, Updike walked from the Empire State Building to the Rockefeller Center without walking on Fifth or Sixth Avenue — a task that involved climbing through a basement window and squeezing underneath fences. He described his work: "The New Yorker paid me to gad about, to interview tertiary celebrities, to peek into armories, and to write accounts of my mild adventures."

After two years at The New Yorker, Updike and his wife had another child, and they decided to leave the city for a 17th-century house in the small town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. He wrote: "The decade was the sixties, my wife and I were youngish, and the house suited us just fine. [...] A previous owner had put a pipe and a pole in a small upstairs room to make a walk-in closet; fair weather or foul, I would hike from our bedroom to my clothes every morning. I find I have no memory at all of where my wife kept hers. Perhaps, it being the sixties, she only needed a miniskirt and a lumberjack shirt. Our children, four of them, slept in four little rooms in a row above the long kitchen, which for a time had been two kitchens, a partition intervening. There had been only two children when we moved in, and if there had been six little rooms, we might have felt obliged to fill them up."

By 1959, Updike was just five years out of Harvard, but already he had published more than a hundred pieces in The New Yorker and finished three books: a novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959); a book of poetry, The Carpentered Hen (1958); and a book of stories, The Same Door (1959). That same year, he began the novel Rabbit, Run (1960), which he followed with the sequels Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), andRabbit at Rest (1990). Those novels, the best-known of his books, tell the life story of Harry Angstrom, nicknamed "Rabbit," a former high school basketball star living in suburban Pennsylvania. Updike said: "I could observe, looking around me at American society in 1959, a number of scared and dodgy men — and I felt a certain fright and dodginess within myself. This kind of man who won't hold still, who won't make a commitment, who won't quite pull his load in society, became Harry Angstrom. [...] He accumulated characteristics — even his nickname, ‘Rabbit.' Rabbits are dodgy, rabbits are sexy, rabbits are nervous, rabbits like grass and vegetables."

Updike wrote more than 50 books, including 22 novels. His books include Couples(1968), Too Far to Go (1979), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), In the Beauty of the Lilies(1996), and Terrorist (2006).

He said, "No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of bringing news. Memories, impressions, and emotions from your first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. By the age of 40, you have probably mined the purest veins of this precious lode; after that, continued creativity is a matter of sifting the leavings."

@nprbooks: News From Lake Wobegon: Garrison Keillor Has A New Book Of Poetry http://t.co/xxmuiN15Hf #whypoetrymatters @writersalmanac
— Why Poetry (@WhyPoetry) March 18, 2014

American Smooth : Poetry Everywhere : Video : The Poetry Foundation

American Smooth : Poetry Everywhere : Video : The Poetry Foundation

An Intro to Poetry