Tweetspeak Poetry

The Joy of Poetry Book Club: Problem Poets

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Joy of Poetry book club yellow rose

Yes, Merry Nell, poets can be a little weird.

—Megan Willome

I have a certain poem in pre-draft status—meaning, it’s been in existence for quite a while in my head, and lines might be occasionally mumbled aloud but it hasn’t made its way to actual paper. Mentioning it here will probably doom the poor unfinished thing to a sort of poem purgatory, an infernal not-quite capacity from which it may never emerge. But it could find itself there indefinitely anyway, so, really, what’s the harm? At least the poem can be written about, if never actually written.

The pre-draft poem wishes to be Tony Hoagland, or so it says in its yet-unwritten lines. Not Tony himself, of course. That would be weird. But the poem asks to be the sort of guy that Tony Hoagland is when he writes his poems, who makes words do things that seem otherwise impossible for mere mortals.

In “Hearings, ” Hoagland writes

since language uses us
the way that birds use sky,
the way that seeds and viruses
braid themselves into a mammal’s fur
and hitchhike toward the future.

When you say a word,
you enter its vocabulary,
it’s got your home address, your phone number
and weight—it won’t forget

It might be that my elusive poem is wishing to have the power over humans that it perceives a poet can have over words. I wouldn’t know, though, since it’s not yet permitted itself to be written.

You might know about my volume of poetry by John Keats. I’ve written of it more times than I ought, but my life with poetry is bound up in the old gray dusty book with the upside-down cover that lets me pretend to be reading when I’m not, or to actually read while I pretend to be absent-minded. I picked up the book at a monastery I used to visit when I was new to poetry. The collection, which I found difficult to read in the beginning (thus opting more often to pretend), proved Megan Willome’s words before they had, in fact, been written in The Joy of Poetry: “A lot of writers don’t read poetry. A lot of readers don’t read it either. Maybe because, let’s face it, there’s a problem with the poets.”

For me, with John Keats, there was a problem with the poet. He was a fancy boy with fancy words who wrote things like

O for ten years that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed
That my own soul has to itself decreed.
Then I will pass the countries that I see
In long perspective, and continually
Taste of their pure fountains

I tried to pretend it meant something to me when really I was thinking poetry (or poesy) and those who wrote it were weird. And then along came Tony Hoagland, who surely has his own idiosyncrasies, but who struck me as simply human, and deeply so, with a way of using language (or letting language use him) that allowed poetry to make sense, even enough so that I could later go back and find in John Keats less of the weird and more of a favorite poet and even a deep attachment to his long perspective and pure fountains.

Favorite Things

We’re reading Megan’s The Joy of Poetry together in our book club this month, this week pondering chapters 7-13. Here are some of my favorite parts:

Poetry isn’t generally popular. It doesn’t often get a bunch of likes and favorites and thumbs up. It usually impacts people in the tens, not the ten thousands. (p. 61)

. . . the speaker bakes a pie instead of writing a poem because she knows the pie will be good—the poem? Hard to tell. (p. 65)

No one understands a poet like another poet. (p. 73)

If I lie still, I can remember that summer. I can remember how Diet Coke tasted different when I had to walk a mile from Westminster School to buy one. I remember feeling scared when I got lost in the maze at Hampton Court Palace. I can hear the guy, chained to a pole, wearing only underwear, shouting profanity in Leicester Square. And none of this comes back to me in iambic pentameter. (p. 75)

Not all good poetry is weird, and not all weird poetry is good. (p. 79)

But for the love of T.S. Eliot . . .  (p. 96)

It’s not hard to love poetry. But it’s oh-so-easy to kill that love. (p. 96)

Too often when I hear a poet interviewed, the journalist assumes every word in the poem is biography. If that were true, the poet would have written an autobiography, or at least a memoir. (p. 102)

Poetry has the power to transform the truth. It can obscure facts the poet prefers remain hidden. It can protect people the poet loves. A poem offers protection in a way that memoir or creative nonfiction never can. In today’s digital climate, where everyone’s bio is available with a click, even fiction can be too revealing. But in poetry the poet can be hyperspecific about a moment without revealing too much. (p. 106)

Poetry is my prescription for adversity. (p. 108)

I don’t need to know how the eggshells got broken. (p. 108)

Your Turn

Are you reading with us? Perhaps in the comments you would share your thoughts from this week’s reading: tell us about a section that stood out or spoke to you, share a “favorite thing, ” or maybe you have a memory of poetry or a poet seeming weird.

The Joy of Poetry Reading Schedule:

May 4: Chapters 1 – 6
May 11: Chapters 7 – 12
May 18: Chapters 13 – 18

We also invite you to explore the ideas in How to Keep, Save and Make Your Life With Poems beginning on page 148 and consider, at least for the duration of our book club, keeping a poetry journal or signing on a poetry buddy.

Photo by Toshihiro Oimatsu,  Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by LW Lindquist.

___________________

The Joy of Poetry

Megan Willome’s The Joy of Poetry—part memoir, part poetry reflections, part anthology—takes readers on a journey to discovering poetry’s purpose, which is, delightfully, nothing. “Why poetry?” Willome asks. “You might as well ask, why chocolate?” Poetry reflects nothing more and nothing less than the pure joy of living, loving, and being, in all of its confusion and wonder. Willome’s book will gently guide you to read, write, and be a little more human through language’s mystery and joy.

—Tania Runyan, author of How to Read a Poem: Based on the Billy Collins Poem “Introduction to Poetry”

BUY THE JOY OF POETRY NOW

Will Willingham
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About Will Willingham

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

Comments

  1. Maureen says

    I remember the first time I read poems by John Ashbery. I never found a way to get through his stuff. It’s needlessly unmeaningful. I have a little mental chamber where poets like him go; once in, they rarely get out. (I have one for visual artists, too; the kind who make deliberately ugly art or just lay a bunch of bricks on the floor and call it “Untitled”.)

    Love your Favorite Things section.

    Reply

    • Laura Brown says

      Speaking of deliberately ugly art, I still feel unsettled about the art contest in second grade where the categories were Prettiest or Ugliest and I chose the latter because I figured there’d be less competition. And I won. Under protest, because I did some things that some of the other drawers of ugliness thought were outside the unwritten rules.

      Reply

  2. Marilyn says

    I, too, love your “Favorite Things” section.

    The unwritten poem that won’t let go, the one that wants to be Tony Hoagland…….ah, that’s the one that has something really good in it. It might be below the surface, still waiting to emerge, but it’s got something. I just know it.

    * * *

    True Confession: I purchased TJOP not for the poetry but for the memoir.* I’ve surrounded myself with various forms of memoir lately because I have some memoirish stuff to write and I’m interested in how others are doing it. But Megan is taking me down poetry paths I’ve haven’t been on for years. Also, writing paths.

    Two lines (especially) underscore a couple of essential truths about writing well, things I need to remind myself of regularly:

    ”It became about my story, not Tretheway’s” (p.105). I was, for a long time, afraid to tell a particular story. I feared the exposure and what questions might follow that would open up my private life in a way I wouldn’t like. When I finally told it (twice now, at 2 speaking gigs), I discovered the story drove every person back to their own story, and they were all different! Megan’s right about detailing a specific that speaks of the universal (“be hyperspecific about a moment without revealing too much”).

    “I don’t have to know how the eggshells got broken” (p. 108) YES! Cut, cut, cut the backstory.

    *(Also, because if Megan Willome has something to say, I want to listen.)

    Reply

    • Will Willingham says

      I’m with you, Marilyn. I bought multiple copies of this book sight unseen because Megan wrote it. 🙂

      This book does such a wonderful job of being both memoir and poetry. And I think the weaving of poetry throughout allows another dimension to the memoir that not all authors could accomplish in quite that way.

      The favorite things is my favorite thing. 🙂

      Reply

    • Christina Hubbard says

      Marilyn, I love that you revealed a piece of your heart at your speaking gigs. Jane Kenyon tells a about reading a depression poem of hers at a reading and watching a man in the crowd nod his head up and down the whole time (I think with eyes closed). He found his story in hers.

      Reply

    • Megan Willome says

      Marilyn, I love how sharing your story drove people more deeply into their own stories. Well done!

      The parts of the book you’re mentioning are among those I was most passionate about writing.

      Reply

  3. Jody Collins says

    Megan’s weaving memoir with poetry is indeed what makes this book so different and readable. It’s hard to choose any favorite passages or lines in ch. 7-13; my copy has too many folded down pages.
    I’ll focus on this, Megan’s ‘Blue Moon’ poem.
    The words resonate because my own mother died of cancer at a very young age–55–and I was only 33. We did not have the best relationship, primarily because of my newfound faith at the ripe old age of 19, all come-to-Jesus-y in your face. (Not the best advertisement for God.)
    These lines in particular touched me:
    “we talk as only mothers and daughters can–
    speech as rocky as the lunar surface.”
    then this,
    “will her tides still move my every wave?”

    I’ve begun writing a memoir of my own and have discovered it’s actually not a book about me–it’s about my mother…and how “her tides still move my every wave.”
    No matter how hard we try (as Megan later on discusses) we will always reflect a part of the woman who raised us, in spite of our best intentions or declarations to the contrary.

    Reply

  4. Christina Hubbard says

    “Seeing is not believing when it comes to poetry—hearing is.” Reading poetry aloud makes me slow down and see the world as it truly is. My ears ring with its rhythms and pacing. If I can’t feel a poem sometimes, I move on to one I can. I agree with Megan, poetry does have perfect pitch and reading it aloud can train the mind and the ear to learn its tune.

    I found myself feeling these chapters deeply as my dad is dealing with an unknown illness (possibly cancer). I sat down and read 7-12 in one sitting today, and then scrawled a poem about how I used to hate how he whipped mashed potatoes when I was a teen. It was a therapeutic repentance, of sorts, but at the same time, I had to stop myself to go on with my day. I am finding myself in Megan’s story too, in my own way.

    I am captivated by the idea of poetic memoir and wonder too, is a memoir interspersed with poetry, like this one, really that rare? We poets need to fix that.

    “Poetry is a nookish sort of place. (Biography and poetry are mysterious friends.) I want to tuck myself in the corner of a library like the Bodleian or something like Hogwarts and eat TJOP whole.
    I’ll be sitting in the corner with eggshells strewn about.

    Reply

    • Megan Willome says

      LOVE your last two sentences, Christina.

      And I’m so happy to hear you wrote a poem about how your dad whipped mashed potatoes. It can be hard, after writing that kind of poem, to go on with your day, but ultimately, through writing it, it’s easier to go on with your life.

      Reply

    • Laurie Klein says

      Christina, I know what you mean. Broken eggshells here, too. I binged on way too many chapters last night, read clear to the end of the book. I will go back and re-read to better absorb all Megan offers us in this genre-rich treasury. And? May I add, though we’ve not met: I feel an empathic ache in my chest, hearing of your father’s illness and the cathartic potato poem unfolding amid the demands of a day.

      Reply

    • Will Willingham says

      I wonder too, Christina, if it is so rare to find poetry and memoir woven together? I’m not sure. But what Megan has done (if the comment boxes of these discussions are any indication, and I do believe they are) is somehow woven them in such a way that people are able to reach into their own stories.

      Masterful, really.

      Reply

  5. Brad says

    Ted Kooser is a wonderfully accessible poet who writes of his own flirtation with poetic weirdness. (See his Home Repair Manual for Poetry) I’ve had to repent of this as well and these days truly love accessible poetry. This is one of the themes I appreciated in Megan’s book.
    This may sound weird but in high school one of the few academic things that captivated me was Shakespeare’s language. I didn’t understand it. It was not accessible like, say, the Rolling Stones.
    But Shakespeare was enthralling. He was a sign post to another world, I think. It has taken, and still takes, some work for me to access the Bard but he is worth it. I guess I’m saying that access to a poet may not be immediate but often repays some effort on our part.

    Reply

  6. Donna Falcone says

    I was so caught by Sally Clark’s short little string of words: Dust is a symbol of all that’s left undone, and it gave me lots to ponder. I immediately remembered all of the things left undone in my house, my garden, my life, during a time of my own illness.

    It also reminded me of my mom and how dust took on a new meaning when my sons were younger and I was battling Lyme Disease etc. The presence of dust in my home really bothered and embarassed me. There was a lot of shame over it for me, even though it was just one of those things I literally couldn’t do. Of all people, my mom (who had overseen strict cleaning of the house and doing of chores), surprised me by saying “Aw – leave it be, Donna.” She’d squintwink and say “It’s a protective covering anyway, so forget it!” and we’d laugh. How funny that she, who had seemed so invested in my dusting properly during chores, was letting me off the hook. Now, looking back at it all, I suspect this was her way of saying she had hoped to protect me from my father’s perfectionism back then. I’m not sure, but it feels that way. Dust protects furniture, and my mom protected me. Maybe. Needless to say, now that I am able to dust more, I do not. I have my furniture to protect, after all. 😉 Besides, it makes me smile to think this might be the hidden story. 🙂

    Reply

  7. Lane Arnold says

    “Sometimes we write for an audience of one, just to help up remember.” (61)

    Holding sorrow’s been unbearable this week…until I wrote a poem that held my sorrow.

    Having relinquished it to words, I sobbed. I stumbled around it, its facets, its broken egg shells, its “Mystery that is ..comforting” (81) and saw both sorrow and poem “like a single penny at the bottom of the fountain.” (77) (More like a deep ocean canyon than a fountain, but still…)

    Creativity and imagination also companion me these days…and, in reading the segment on poetry for children (81-83), my love of poetry shouted, “Share me. Share me.”

    For the four years since grandchildren became part of our wonderland, I’ve bought two copies of books: one for them, one for me. Then, FaceTime together, I read to them…and the oldest, age 4, is now reading back to me…the same book and pictures connecting us though separated by 1469 miles.

    I’ll now add poetry to the mix. Jonathan already speaks in silly rhyme in conversations, like a rendition of The old song, The Name Game:

    Arnold Arnold bo barnold
    Banana fano fo farnold
    Fe fi mo marnold
    ARNOLD!

    How delightful it will be to share poetry, alongside rhyming books and concept books and stories read and reread and reread!

    The novel I’m working on…one character spouts poetry, which I thought a bit weird and was wondering if that needed to be edited out, but…poem lines shall stay now, having read about other such novels in Megan’s overview on pages 89-93.

    And, what?!?! There is such a thing as a certified poetry therapist? (96-97) I’m a spiritual director…I can see how this group may be fabulous for more inner healing training for me and as a benefit for my directees. Thank you, Megan, for that gem.

    Lianne Mercer’s words resonate, “To me, good poetry is when my heart beats on the page.” (97-98)

    Glad to be again among word lovers as we explore our hearts beating on page after page.

    Reply

      • Lane Arnold says

        When you can’t be close enough to snuggle and read, this is the next best thing! I also bring in finger puppets for the little bitty ones and marionettes for the older ones…a puppet show reenacting the story! Such fun. (But nothing beats being there!)

        Reply

    • Megan Willome says

      Lane, I’m grateful you were able to write a poem that could hold your sorrow. And that you are leaving a poetry-spouting character in your novel.

      Also, I love hearing how you are incorporating poetry and *fun* into your grandchildren’s lives. You’re showing us the way.

      Reply

      • Lane Arnold says

        The timing of reading your words, Megan, as I was pondering the poetry-spouting character: serendipity.

        And the fun of grands plus the delight of poetry will be a blast.

        Though I never imagined living so far from all my grands, who are not even close geographically to one another, I find that words (and the wonder of technology) keep us closely connected. Creativity and entering into their world while introducing them to the wider world helps us all!

        Reply

      • Lane Arnold says

        When the sorrow was just rattling around inside of me, it was taking me out…wearing me out. By relinquishing it to words, by naming it, walking around its facets, it became more bearable, less intrusive.

        Glad to be here, LW.

        Reply

  8. Bethany R. says

    LW, I’ve definitely felt this way before: “Mentioning it here will probably doom the poor unfinished thing to a sort of poem purgatory, an infernal not-quite capacity from which it may never emerge.” Isn’t it funny how that works? I’ll echo one of your favorites from Megan’s book, “No one understands a poet like another poet.”

    About the poems written during her mother’s illness: “[they] are both precise and opaque. […] They’re breadcrumbs, left all over the trail of her last three years.” Yes. I can relate to this.

    “I don’t know if poets’ lives are always harder. I want that not to be true. But would I have come back to poetry any other way?” Interesting. I want that not to be true too! Maybe it’s just that poetry can be a medicine cabinet, and therefore tends to draw the hurting to itself?

    I also love the inclusion of Ann Kroeker’s poem, “Fragile,” and that Megan pointed out, “This pain of mourning the poet feels—it’s tactile.” This is interesting to me because when I’ve gone through loss, I find myself physically reaching out with my hands much more. Running my palms and pads of my fingers through the low-hanging leaves of my maple tree as I walk to the mailbox, or through the broad-hand leaves of my peace lily (the one memorial plant I still have growing here years later).

    Reply

    • Will Willingham says

      Yeah, I’m one of those who does best not to talk about the writing until there’s at least a draft out, whether it’s a poem or an essay. Part of the writing process is working it out, and speaking it just messes it up. 🙂

      There is something about using our hands (I would say more, but I am writing on this at the moment, and, well… 😉 ) It’s good that you know this, and give yourself the space for reaching.

      Reply

  9. Emily Conrad says

    This line was among my favorites from this section: Poetry isn’t generally popular. It doesn’t often get a bunch of likes and favorites and thumbs up. It usually impacts people in the tens, not the ten thousands. (p. 61)

    I write novels, and I hear from agents and editors how important it is to gain a platform of thousands of followers. That noisy pressure could drown out the sound of the words I’d like to write. On the other hand, the acknowledgement that poetry resonates with a small group of people is freeing. I appreciate the reminders that it’s okay to not like a poem and it’s not only okay but expected that I’ll write some bad poems. I’ll learn and grow in the writing. And I’ll subtract from that queue of 200 bad poems, one by one by one. But even when I write that 201st poem, it’s still not about pleasing thousands. Freeing.

    Reply

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