Poetic Waxing (and Waning) January 31, 2019

Copyright © 2019                               John F. Oyler 

January 31, 2019

Poetic Waxing (and Waning)

A number of unrelated events have me thinking about poetry recently. Our Book Club recently read various works by Edgar Allen Poe, including his poem “The Raven”. This led to a discussion of poetry in general and complaints about the awarding of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan for his song lyrics.

Part of our extended family this Christmas was my granddaughter Lai An’s other grandfather, Grandpa Pan. He is a scholar of ancient Chinese poetry, specializing in interpreting poems written in archaic Chinese, for modern readers. I gave him a copy of Robert Frost poems for Christmas, accompanied by an explanation that I considered Frost to be the most representative of American poets.

Last week my daughter Elizabeth gave a talk on behalf of the Japan-America Society at City of Asylum on the North Side. Her subject was “Beyond Haiku: Japanese Poetry in Time and Art”. She did an excellent job of tracing the evolution of poetry in Japan from the “choka” of the eighth century to today’s interest in haiku.

Thinking about poetry, I have concluded that I enjoy it more than I realized. I certainly have always liked the long narrative poems of the Longfellow style, especially “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Song of Hiawatha”. 

In my engineering classes at Pitt I often quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” as an example of balanced design. Upset that the failure of one component in a buggy destroyed the utility of the still serviceable parts, he designed a “wonderful one hoss shay”, with every part designed to last one hundred years. Sure enough, one hundred years to the day after it was built, its owner found himself sitting in a pile of dust when everything deteriorated at once.

How about “Casey at the Bat”? It was my choice to recite in high school when I tried out for the Dramatic Club. Unfortunately, my recitation failed to match the drama of the poem, and I was turned down. Another questionable, more recent, recitation was “A Visit from St. Nicholas” which I stumbled through with lots of help from prompters this past Christmas Eve.

Beyond that, I certainly like all of Frost’s poems. Each one is a classic; in total, they paint a myriad of images of Americana that are dear to all of us. And mixed throughout are memorable touches of philosophy, e. g., “promises to keep” in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. I am sure it helps that his poems follow a standard format, and that they rhyme.

The current definition of poetry focuses on the aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language to evoke non-prosaic meanings. Prose mimics the natural flow of speech, completely ignoring rhythm and meter. Rhyming is merely a characteristic of a special form of poems, one that I consider an enhancement.

I wonder if my general difficulty with poems is related to the concept of rhythm, a problem that always inhibited me on the dance floor. Certainly it is a common denominator between poetry and music, one that does not come naturally to me. Do you suppose good dancers are also good poets?

At some point in my graduate school career I took a course in Appreciation of Poetry at Carnegie Tech; the poems we read and discussed continue to be favorites of mine. “Pied Beauty”, by Gerard Manley Hopkins; “Dover Beach”, by Matthew Arnold; “anyone lived in a pretty how town”, by E. E. Cummings – I remember and enjoy re-reading each of them.

What a shame that I have to study a poem to enjoy it! My wife used to tease me about my inability to appreciate something without dissecting it into its tiniest constituents. She loved poetry without qualification, and, yes, she was an excellent dancer. Somewhere in our documents is an eloquent, poignant poem she wrote following her father’s untimely death.

One of the highlights of Elizabeth’s undergraduate days at Pitt was the evening she and her mother spent there listening to Maya Angelou. Apparently Elizabeth has inherited the her mother’s poetic genes. 

In contradiction to the opinion of my colleagues I think awarding the Nobel Prize to Dylan was appropriate. I have long believed that popular songwriters were the poets of our society in the late twentieth century. Personally, the hillbilly in me prefers Kris Kristofferson, Townes van Zandt, and Jimmy Webb to Bob Dylan, but it is impossible to overlook his place in popular music.

Interestingly I counted forty-seven recipients of the Prize for Literature since 1901 who include poetry as one of the forms of literature they practice. However there were only two – William Butler Yeats and T. S Eliot – whom I recognized. Dylan makes three. Too bad the judges in the earlier years didn’t consider Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, or Cole Porter --- they too were excellent poets.

As for haiku, my attitude toward it is colored by bad experiences in the past. On several occasions when Elizabeth was teaching Japanese literature, she sponsored haiku writing competitions for her students, and in parallel for her circle of friends and family. Invariably I came in dead last or nearly so, greatly embarrassed by her Maddy cousins. 

Today haiku has been formalized, three lines (phrases) in a five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables sequence. References to nature and seasons is common. It is also typical for a haiku to include two dissimilar images and ideas with a transitional idea linking them.

The most famous haiku is by Matsuo Basho. Its first phase has been translated as “old pond”. Easy to imagine the image of a tranquil, never-changing small body of water somewhere in a forest. Then comes “frog leaps in” and “water’s sound”. Dramatically different image – impermanence, chaos. 

I am comfortable with the concept of contrasting images that are well presented, but it is not clear to me where the idea of rhythm and meter applies. Recognizing rhythm in such a short poem is akin to clapping one hand. Perhaps if one understood the subtle meanings of the Japanese words and heard the haiku recited, one could appreciate its poeticism.

My “Appreciation of Poetry” textbook is by a distinguished scholar and teacher from Wesleyan University, Fred Millet. The introduction to his book states that its purpose “is to train young people in the intensive reading of literature”. The professor would be surprised to know this octogenarian is still referring to it six decades later.