What is Poetry?
“airy nothingness” or “transformative”?
Poetry is a wind that listeth: a barbaric people may have great poetry, they cannot have great prose. Prose is an institution, part of the equipment of civilization, part of its heritable wealth, like its laws, or its system of schooling, or its tradition of skilled craftsmanship. - J.S. Phillimore
Do you, like me, find poetry an obscure art form?
I “get” prose. I don't fully appreciate poetry - but I want to - maybe that’s a New Year Resolution - so when I read the above quote in Prose Readings: An Anthology for Catholic Colleges (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942) I thought, “hmm, maybe I should get in touch with my barbaric side.”
I’ve posted some poetry here in the past: great Catholic poets like Francis Thompson and John Banister Tabb and the Anglican archbishop Richard Chenevix Trench, but the art is largely lost on me.
I want to appreciate Thompson, Tabb and Trench (sounds like a law firm) and others like Joyce Kilmer, Alice Meynell, Emily Dickinson, G.M. Hopkins and the poetry of the “beats” like Jack Kerouac.
So, in a search for something along the lines of “Poetry 101” I found the contemporary poet Dana Gioia, who is also an essayist - and author of The Catholic Writer Today - and because he “gets” both poetry and prose, I hoped he would be a good resource in my quest to appreciate the art.
And he is.
In a twenty-six minute video (linked below) Gioia delivers exactly what I need to get started. He defines poetry, lays out the nature and history of the art, and the best way to approach it.
“Poetry,” Gioia says, “is the most concise, expressive, moving, and memorable way of articulating what it means to be human.” Now, there is some real incentive to stay the course. So, I’m on the road to a greater appreciation of the art - to seeing poetry as “transformative” rather than “airy nothingness.” If you want to tag along: Here is the Dana Gioia video.
The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee ;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
- Emily Dickinson