hate/love: poetry
I have a lot of love/hate or maybe actually hate/love relationships. Like one of the fast food restaurants in town – Chad and I call it by different names depending on if we like it or not at the time. It’s a combined KFC and Taco Bell, and we both like Taco Bell but not really KFC, so when we’re showing disdain for it we call it KFC, and when we want to go there for lunch, we call it Taco Bell.
It’s a little more subtle with poetry. When I was younger I wrote some poetry -sappy, overly simplistic pieces, with some form – in high school they were for classes so they had a little structure. In my first year in college I took an English class focused on poetry – I was not sure what I would major in and I had done well in English in high school. I never grew to develop a skill at analyzing poetry. I hadn’t even liked reading it before then, but writing it doesn’t really require that. In that poetry class I learned that every poem was about sex, and as soon as I started reading sex into an assigned poem, it was one of a few exceptions to the rule. For a naive Catholic school student like me, it was near impossible to come up with the right answers in time for class discussion. I did the assignments and listened closely but it was too subjective for me, and seemed to require that I be much more well-read than I was. I’d abandoned any interest in the reading or writing of poetry, until I stumbled upon this mindfulness thing I’ve been working on. Independent of any program or meditation or recommended reading, I have started to come up with tools that will help me to be more mindful. And I’ve found that memorizing poetry has actually been a useful framework for the work. First there’s the whole memorization process – it requires repetition that I think increases focus and forces one’s focus away from stray thoughts to the task at hand. Then, any time you want to take yourself away from your thoughts and focus on neutral territory and just think and hear yourself breathe, you have these words you can recite, slowing you down and taking you away from the day. I started with a speech actually, since I used to have it memorized – The Gettysburg Address. It worked okay. It was long though. And not the right tone or something. Then I picked a nice simple poem a friend of mine introduced me to: Charles Bukowski’s The Laughing Heart. I like this one a lot. It is slightly chopping when reciting, and also a bit pessimistic, which can be good and bad.
My latest to memorize was Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. It’s another light, brief poem. Oliver’s work appeals to me – maybe because I’m pretty sure a lot of it is just about nature, not allusion after allusion to sex, and it seems charmingly simple without being naive and sappy. The tempo of this poem is an improvement on the last one. It has another trait that really works for me. It feels like the opposite of a prayer. When I first started using memorized lines for mindfulness, I used old prayers I will probably never forget from years of Catholic school and church. The Hail Mary is pretty harmless: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Yeah, mostly the prayer is about how great Mary is, but it also has that “pray for us sinners” part, that has to be present in all prayers and Catholic literature, in order to amplify one’s Catholic Guilt. Oliver, on the other hand, seems to be directly dismissing pleas of this sort, or a feeling of needing to be saintly and full of repentance. She starts the piece off with:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the small animal of your body
love what it loves.
I find that beautifully anti-guilt, anti-preachy. And simple enough for my anti-poetry mind. It seems to me that when Oliver talks about the “clear pebbles of the rain” and the “deep trees”, she is talking about actual nature, and that the title refers to real birds. At least that’s what I choose to believe.
If I ever find the best poem I wrote for my college poetry class, I am going to post it here to show just how simple I like my poetry. And sometime maybe I will elaborate on the topic of Catholic Guilt. Boy do I have a lot to say on that topic.
