Poetry

   In a recent blog, I mentioned that one of my all-time favourite movies is "Four Weddings and a Funeral". I then went on to list some of the qualities about it I liked best. One of the reasons I like it is that it contains poetry.
   In his eulogy to his partner, Gareth (Simon Callow), Matthew (John Hannah) reads a poem to the mourners who are gathered. It was W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues". I had never heard this poem before and, up to that point in the movie, it was nothing I'd been expecting. It seemed I'd even forgotten the actual title of the movie and was not prepared for either one of its larger-than-life characters to pass away or this poem's recitation to move me the way it did. It took the general tone of the movie and turned it a full one hundred and eighty degrees.
   The following is a clip of the movie wherein John Hannah recites the poem: 

   This is what I love about poetry. It does have the power to at least momentarily grab hold of you and re-arrange the way you view or think about something. In "Funeral Blues", Auden manages to take the demise of one single person and and stop the world with it. It's not one of those "death" poems that's trying to be uplifting either, the last line clearly shows a depth and length of despair which appears to be almost interminable.
   My love of poetry began back in the sixties. As I became interested in popular music, I found myself drifting towards artists such as Simon and Garfunkel and Leonard Cohen. Cohen, in particular, bridged the gap between poet and musical artist demonstratively. We studied Cohen in high school, both his music and his written work. For me, it was the perfect blend of words and music I'd never heard the like of before. I imagine it also appealed to the introspective and analytical part of whoever I thought I was at the time.
   It is tempting to include one of his pieces of music here but I'm saving that for another post somewhere down the road. I would like to include, though, one of his poems that has resonated with me the last forty years or so. It is from a book of poetry entitled "The Spice Box of Earth".

 I wonder how many people in this city 

I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when I look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.

  

                        
                                             


     
   
   When I went to retrieve the words to this poem, I was amazed at how many other bloggers had taken the time to write about it. It clearly had struck a chord with many other people, not just myself. I think if you are a writer of any kind then you tend to look a little more closely at the things unfolding all around you. Writing is also a bit of a lonely thing to do and nowhere is this demonstrated better than in this poem by Cohen. How much more alone can you be than to be in an apartment by yourself where the furniture is not even your own, looking out over a world of anonymous strangers? But the poet in Cohen has seen through to the universality of this and wondered if maybe we are all in the same boat together. When you realize this, the potential of us all being together in our loneliness arises. This will not stop you from being isolated but once you realize you are not alone in your isolation it's not quite as terrifying. When I read this poem the first time the imagery hit me like a tiny little thunderbolt. This, then, is one of the things I love about poetry.

Bronwen Wallace

   Speaking about thunderbolts, I once read a book called "The Stubborn Particulars of Grace", by Bronwen Wallace. I had attended a reading she did here in London, admired her poetry greatly, and bought this book afterwards. Just a few short months later she was dead of cancer, sadly. My signed copy of her book is now one of my prized possessions.
   Wallace, more than any other poet I'd read up to that time, pointed out the potential for poetry in everyday life. She essentially looked at the everyday goings-on in her life and saw the significance beyond their surfaces. Occasionally, I will read a poem and go holy crap at the end of it. Just about every single poem in "The Stubborn Particulars of Grace" evoked that response and I read the book over and over. It greatly affected the type of poetry I was writing at the time simply because it made me realize that almost anything can be a poem. It was then I really started looking at the world in a new light.
   In a "Fifty Shades of Grey" kind of world, you don't see a lot of people sitting there, reading poetry, anymore. As I remember, back in high school we were more or less forced to read the little bit of poetry we did. I took a little less forcing than most of the rest of us and I'm kind of happy for this. I get back to the books of poetry I still have every now and then. Besides Cohen and Wallace, I could also recommend Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Bill Bissett, Lorna Crozier, Colleen Thibaudeau, James Reaney, Anne Michaels and Michael Ondaatje. Canadians, all of them, and a pretty small selection out of all the great Canadian poets there are. In my life, I have gravitated to the Canadian poets but the world is full of marvelous writers of poetry, Auden included.

   So give poetry a try. Go to a reading the next time there is one. Join a poetry group. Download a song but maybe read the lyrics at the same time. Sit with a kid and do rhymes. Take a song you enjoy and give it your own words. Look at the world around you and try to figure out what one thing means to the next. None of this will be nearly as painful as it may seem to you now. Poetry is worth it, in whatever dose you choose!