Essence of Poetry

Author's note: This is an edited version of a final project I submitted for an undergraduate poetry class. It's part creative rambling and part poetic analysis.

1

Sometimes, a poem comes as a memory, my attraction to it tied up in the experience of reading it for the first time. More rarely, a poem is simply attached to the self, detached from an initial meeting and existing as something I have always known. Reading these poems is an emotional experience rather than a literary one, in which I cannot separate what happens inside me from what happens on the page. As far as I am concerned, these poems were written to reflect every red, fleshy bit of my heart, and the rest be damned. (An arrogant thought, perhaps, but I do believe the process of analyzing poetry is often self-absorbed). Any poem can have literary merit, can be well-written, can inspire respect and admiration. It is a rare poem that makes me forget about those things, in favor of the visceral.

In high school, I had a poetry teacher who introduced me to the concept of “barn burner” poems. These poems elicit strong emotional reactions that shock the reader, burn them in their intensity, as the name implies. The experience of reading a barn burner unfolds as follows: (1) absorb each image as a blow to the body, no time in between to prepare for the next, (2) reach the final line and sit in silence, unable to look away from the page, and (3) read the poem again and again and again, until the fire dulls and you can form a coherent thought. I am interested in discussing barn burners because this is what I want from the experience of reading a poem. I am interested in that which burns me, sets my house on fire, and won’t let me look away.

Stephen Crane’s “In the Desert” is one such poem. I don’t remember how or when I came across this poem, and thus, it feels like it has always been with me. I don’t have to read it to return to it because I’ve long since memorized the words, and they often come to mind. Despite this, reciting the words in my head is very different from reading the poem on the page in its entirety. It is a slow unraveling, this moment between the man and creature depicted, much like how I imagine the process of taking your own heart out to eat it, as the poem illustrates. I read this poem and get the feeling of something unnamable welling up inside me, until the last three lines prompt it to spill over, and I have to put a hand to my chest to hold it in (it’s an odd, instinctual reaction, but it happens every time): “But I like it / Because it is bitter, / And because it is my heart.” I’ve entertained the idea of tattooing these words on my body because it feels as though they are always within it, and I’d like a more visible manifestation.

What is it about this poem that incites both an emotional and physical response, no matter how many times I read it? What makes a poem a barn burner, for me? To answer these questions, I thought I would look to the things that often interest me in literature, certain words, images, or motifs that hold my attention. I will refer to them as “literary fixations,” as I consider them interests that I will never be rid of, things that I am irrevocably compelled by.

2

A literary fixation can manifest as many things, an interest in specific literary devices, a favorite genre, or preferred thematic elements. There is also the more surface-level approach, which I’m often guilty of – a simple interest in keywords. I call this “surface-level” because my attraction to these words and images is purely aesthetic. They’ll give me pause if I’m skimming through a series of poems, a kind of beacon that stands out from the page. The following is a list of some words that capture my attention, without fail: desire, hunger, night, darkness, passion/passionate, love, magic, fire, moon, heart, bones. Do you see a pattern? I certainly do and am often amused by own predictability.

It is this predictability that allows me to understand that which holds me in a poem. I could perhaps take a psychoanalytical approach here and attempt an exploration of why I am attracted to the things I am in literature. Discussing this in terms of “fixation” and “attraction” certainly holds these connotations, but I admit that I don’t have any formal education in psychoanalysis. I use these words because they seem most appropriate to my individual experiences with reading poetry. I can’t explain why I’m more likely to linger on a poem set in the nighttime, what it is about images of the moon or allusions to monsters that capture my attention. The visceral, the instinctual, the hint of something that my gut recognizes before my brain catches up – that is what makes a literary fixation.

Beyond the aesthetic interest lie thematic elements that I prefer to read. This separates “What Bores Me” from the poems that I take my time with. I enjoy poems about connections and intimacy between people, the individual artistic process, explorations of the self and interiority. I’m bored by poems about war, the passage of time and aging, and religious poems. I’ve noticed that my interest or disinterest manifest physically through my reading process. While looking over a poem that bores me, my eyes flit restlessly across the page, searching for something to rest on. When they finally do rest, it’s almost as if they are magnetized. A poem that holds my attention holds my entire being. I trace the words on the page with my finger, my mouth moves to feel the shape of them. Reading poetry is as corporeal as it is emotional.

3

What takes a poem from initial, surface-level interest to personal connection? How do the words and thematic elements I’ve listed above translate to meaning and feeling? I recognize a process of identification as integral to the act of reading poetry. If I cannot identify with an exploration of humanity (what it means to be a person, what it means to feel as a person does) within a poem, that poem will not hold me. I don’t always need to see myself reflected, but I do need to see something vulnerable. A story of someone’s life, a shift captured in their mind or heart – I seek the truth of the human experience. If you believe in an ultimate, unquestionable truth, this is impossible to achieve, but I don’t care much for absolutes. Personhood is mutable, and the uncertainty of it both confounds and fascinates me.

I always return to the poems I feel have the strongest explorations of personhood. In these poems, I find raw engagement with human emotion, and questions of individual identity and human relation. Though I previously mentioned that my relationship with poetry is more visceral than intellectual, I recognize that literary analysis inevitably creeps into my readings. It often happens in retrospect, when I explain my attraction to a poem, almost like a justification. What makes my interest and emotional reaction worth exploring? I hope to find an answer.

4

I look once again to Crane’s “In the Desert” because, out of all the poems to discuss, this one has the strongest hold on me (I love the word hold to talk about poetry; it suggests an intimacy and tenderness unique to reader and poem).

In the first stanza, the lines “I saw a creature, naked, bestial, / Who, squatting upon the ground, / Held his heart in his hands, / And ate of it” strike me immediately. An element of the grotesque – the bestial creature – exists alongside an image of unexpected tenderness – a heart cradled in the hands. This poem recalls one of my favorite literary genres, the gothic, with its suggestion of the supernatural and its monstrous implications, all of which I identify as personal literary fixations. I am also drawn in by the narrative structure of the poem, as I’ve always enjoyed poetry that reads more like a story, rather than an abstraction of thoughts. A cursory reading provides these details, but with several more attentive readings, I get to the center of what makes this poem exist for me.

The poem evolves into an exchange of dialogue, leading to a powerful conclusion: a bitter heart is still a loveable heart, even if you’re the only one who loves it. Crane presents the loneliness, monstrousness, and ugliness of the human condition. Though I sometimes appreciate a pretty, flowery image, a bloody image ensnares me. It takes me deep within myself and implores me to look closely at what I find there. I think many people could identify with Crane’s creature, troubled over the faults in our character and the things we may not want to face. This poem inspires me to not only face those things, but to embrace them, consume them. Inspiration also marks a good poem. Have I come out of this poem thinking or feeling differently than I did before it? Does it make me want to change something about myself? I think I value this more than just identifying with the subject or speaker. Yes, I want to know that I’m not alone in my experience, I want to connect with the experiences of others, but I also want to learn from them. Here lies the true imperative of poetry, an exchange of thoughts and emotions between people, variable strings tying us together.

5

I recognize a difference between poems that represent a breadth of human connection (for me) and poems that explicitly discuss it. The latter often offers sweeping statements about the unification of people, an individual who becomes representative of a larger group of people. I like these images because they dismiss separation, suggest a togetherness that I always seek when I turn to poetry.

Though I cannot identify with its exploration of motherhood, Muriel Rukeyser’s “Night Feeding” carries the voice of a community. A mother wakes in the night to feed her newborn child and, in her child’s cry, she hears “[the] voices of all black animals crying to drink, / cries of all birth arise, simple as we, / found in the leaves, in clouds and dark, in dream, / deep as this hour, ready again to sleep.” Much like the rest of the poem, these lines unfold as a series of images, dark and almost cloying. I am as puzzled as I am enthralled by the poem’s language, reading almost as an incantation that lures the speaker from her slumber. My eye jumps instinctually towards words and images such as “night,” “magic,” “burning song and the tree burning blind,” “gold bones,” and the repetition of the color black, and am reminded of my literary fixations. This poem’s aesthetic profile matches what I so often love in a poem, creates a dreamy and somewhat mysterious mood. Reading it is almost heady, as if I have also woken from a deep sleep, struggling to bridge the gap between dream and reality. I love the experience of this poem because I don’t just read it, I fall into it, as the speaker does the chorus of communal voices that call to all mothers and children.

I’ve discussed two poems that evoke strong sensory reactions, but does this mean that I can’t enjoy a poem without being fully immersed in it? Sometimes, only a portion of a poem strikes me and for reasons that I’m not used to. Anne Sexton’s “The Truth the Dead Know” details a process of grieving that I’m not familiar with, but I still find myself affected by a few lines. “[…] when we touch / we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone. / Men kill for this, or for as much,” Sexton writes, and something about these lines feels heavy to me, a weight in my chest that I can’t quite realize. The image of touch as something more than physical, that which takes one person outside of themselves and into another person speaks to a very poignant intimacy. The poem suggests both that no one is alone in grief and that touch binds us beyond contact with flesh. I’m not immune to a beautiful sentiment, and this poem certainly reminds me of that.

6

Love poems exist in a seemingly particular sect of poetry, but I argue that all poems are love letters to something. I consider this undertaking of mine as a love letter to poetry itself, in all my ramblings about the thoughts and feelings inspired by certain poems. Why would I think about something so much, dedicate myself to detailing the process by which I came to think it if I didn’t love it? We write to understand and to understand is to know deeply enough to love.

That being said, I have a weakness for the traditional love poem, exploring a romantic relationship between speaker and beloved. I admit that I am a bit of a romantic, that I’ve given many thoughts over to longing and desire. Why does poetry seem to capture those thoughts best?

Consider Stanley Kunitz’s “Touch Me,” where the speaker addresses his wife after forty years of marriage. I appreciate the poem’s discussions of love within the grand scheme of time – “some forty years ago / when I was wild with love” and “It is my heart that’s late, / it is my song that’s flown.” Both love and youth are at the mercy of time, and I like the threat of risk here, the suggestion of longing, wanting after that which you once had and lost. I find myself less interested in love poems without a hint of sadness to them because they don’t feel quite as real as those that emphasize the bittersweet. Sometimes, love fades and what does it leave in its wake? “Desire, desire, desire. / The longing for the dance / stirs in the buried life. / One season only, / and it's done,” Kunitz posits as an answer. Desire, longing, yearning, all aspects of a love poem that I believe make it more visceral because both the body and the heart feel them.

The poem ends with the speaker calling to his wife, “Darling, do you remember / the man you married? Touch me, / remind me who I am.” I think back to Sexton’s poem and the human need for touch, physical affection as affirmation of the self. I read the speaker’s words as a plea, a show of vulnerability, an admission of his inability to realize his own identity without his wife’s love. I remember the sigh I let out the first time I read the poem, as if exhaling its sadness. A physical reaction, though a small one. I know this poem holds me, that it made me feel something despite not having anything to compare it to in my own life.

Edwin Morgan’s “Strawberries” inspired a similar reaction, given its narrative structure and portrait of an amorous exchange between lovers. The speaker recalls this summer afternoon as a memory, entangled with his lover. Just as much a sensory experience as the Rukeyser poem, Morgan saturates “Strawberries” in images of two bodies closely entwined, creating a mood of laziness and revelry. “Your knees held in mine,” “hot sunlight,” and “from your eager mouth / the taste of strawberries / in my memory” stand out to me. I can almost taste the sugar of the strawberries, imagine myself outside on the sunny day Morgan depicts. More captivating is the juxtaposition between the simple pleasure of the experience and the speaker’s declaration of “let me love you” toward the poem’s end. Again, I get a sense of the bittersweet creeping in, as the speaker remembers that he can no longer claim this moment in time, only remember what it felt like.

7

Hold, inspire, captivate, strike, burn – all words I’ve used to describe my interest in a poem. They range from gentle and light-handed to violent, though I believe all are appropriate in describing my experience. I am fundamentally concerned with poetry that makes me feel. Some emotions manifest softly, as suggestions of themselves, and other emotions debilitate. I welcome both from poetry, for their reminders of my own vulnerability and that of other poets.