REVISITING BAD POETRY

Watched the movie Bright Star this afternoon, a dramatization of the life of the poet John Keats and his relationship with Fanny Braun. He was always my favourite during my high school and college years, and it prompted me to drag out my poetry file from the deep recesses of the filing cabinet.

I couldn’t find anything from my teenage years, I’d obviously culled them on a previous occasion for the drivel that they were, but some musings from my years at college and since were still there. What is it about those formative years that drives us to write poems and songs, pouring out our hearts on to the page as we deal with lost love, lost hope and lost dreams. All that teenage angst, burgeoning hormones, and attempting to find where we fit in this world with all its complexities, makes a prolific breeding ground for poetry and song writing.

Even though I can see what I was trying to convey, almost all my attempts now I read them again are clumsy and ill formed. They didn’t succeed then, and another look hasn’t improved them, but somehow I find it hard to part with them. I love words, playing with them, rearranging them, but as Keats in the movie states (courtesy of the scriptwriter) If poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it had better not come at all.

I only have a few lines here and there, snippets from five poems, which bring any measure of satisfaction.

How bitter sweet

This love – hate be

Your greatest friend

Your enemy.

With seeming ease

and fearful skill

The potter moulds me to his will

Little bird

why aren’t you singing

Do you hurt somewhere

but cannot tell?

Sun that warms

my upturned face

Throws its rays

upon the child

snivelling in the dirt.

No warmth there.

Meaty hand beats the pulpit

Wrings the pages of The Book.

Reads in tones of condemnation

Lest his listless congregation

Be content to sit and look.

Looking at the dates on the poems, I obviously gave up a long time ago, and probably a good thing. And what of understanding the poetry of others, a pursuit loved by some but despised by most. Dissecting the words penned by someone several hundred years ago was never my favourite part of English Literature, and a process I never found terribly illuminating. It didn’t really add to my appreciation of the poet’s thoughts or their skill in imparting them, but rather detracted from the whole experience of immersing yourself in this mysterious world conjured by the poet magician.

I’ll leave it to Keats (via the movie scriptwriter again) to put it very succinctly.

A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought.