I’ll be reading a lot of poetry this semester.  I’m taking a class this semester whose goal is to teach the various forms and styles contemporary poetry takes, and, so far, have been thrown into the wild with it.  I’ve enjoyed poetry since taking a lower-level version of this course at GVSU, but I’ve never understood how to read it properly, so, even now, reading it is intimidating and difficult.

In saying ‘difficult,’ I actually mean a lot more than the word’s base definition.  Basically, what I experience when reading poetry is distinct from what I expect to experience and what I think skilled/practiced readers experience.  I’d like to briefly discuss something I expect to experience and compare it with what I do experience, with the intention of either reassessing my expectation or discovering some new angle I haven’t yet noticed.

I suppose I expect poetry to affect me emotionally by suggesting to me someone else’s emotions.  I don’t expect to be overturned by emotion: I don’t expect to be bawling (and doubt there’s much artwork out there that could do this, if any), and I don’t expect to be filled with enthusiasm; but I expect to gain some new understanding of emotion.

I’m just now reminded of my favorite poem, T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ which will help me to be a little more specific about what I mean by an ‘understanding of emotion.’  More accurately, I should say that I expect to see through someone else’s eyes when reading poetry, and I know this expectation is not farfetched or impossible because of Eliot’s poetry.  While I can’t recall what, exactly, Eliot’s poem did to me, I recall my enthusiasm at reading it well, and I recall it stemming from the ability to see Prufrock’s situation so thoroughly that I could begin to understand just what life was for him.  I don’t recall exactly what I saw in the poem at the time; I call it my favorite poem only because I know it’s meant more to me than any other poem, rather than what it means to me now.

I haven’t been able to experience this with poetry since.  Perhaps expecting this is too narrow, as poetry should be able to just be a ‘shiny thing’ if it wants.  Poetry can just be something beautiful rather than being some extension of someone else, I suppose.  Regardless of acknowledging this, I still expect something more.  I expect some connection with someone else when I read poetry, and I can’t quite get it.

To elucidate my reaction to poetry in general, I’m going to discuss my reading of the poem ‘Transplants’ in Davis McCombs’s book, Dismal Rock.  Before reading the poem, one should be aware that ‘Bat’ refers to the writer’s great-great-great grandfather, who, in 1835, ‘was considered one of the finest growers of burley tobacco in the state [of Kentucky],’ and who was discussed in the book’s previous poem, which I interpret as discussing his last days.

Transplants

The young man walks where Bat once walked,
over the same tilting slope, the creek in the distance flashing
its signal mirror through gaps in the trees, its windblown
rustle of water and moss.  He straddles gullies
at the red-clay edge of fields, stumbles, and though he walks
in sunlight, he knows that in the mesh of leaves beside him,
under the hornworm’s path, a mortuary darkness waits.
A hard rain shreds the afternoon’s clumped heat; it drips
off the ribs of the drooping leaves; it pushes potsherds
through the sediment, mixing and sorting what the plow reveals,
dispersing flint chips and projectiles, disarticulating bone
from bone.  Now comes the wind off the bottomland;
it enters in the wake of the storm; it sniffs at the dirt-
splattered stalks, and smudges the downpour’s tracks
while the man is sleeping.  Of this much he is certain:
the roots in the long rows suture the furrows; in the kiln
of summer, even the hoed earth scabs like a wound.

The book spends its first 18 pages focusing on tobacco and its growth, so by this point I’m both a little tired of reading about tobacco, but also starting to feel somewhat intimate with its culture even though I’m not able to articulate that intimacy.  This lack represents what stifles me with poetry: throughout this first ‘Tobacco Mosaic’ section, I can tell that something meaningful is going on, but I don’t know what.

This poem exemplifies that.  I don’t really get anything from it.  It seems to be a little story about a man who follows in Bat’s footsteps, thinking about taking that same road that Bat took.  I don’t feel the effect Bat had on the man, and I don’t feel the effect this well-described scene has on him, either.  I see a pretty picture.  I particularly enjoy those last two lines: ‘the roots in the long rows suture the furrows; in the kiln / of summer, even the hoed earth scabs like a wound.’  The idea of comparing the way earth heals in summer to the way our bodies heal is spectacular, but, for me, doesn’t inspire anything.  I don’t see how it connects to the rest of the poem in any significant or insightful way (other than thinking that his own ancestral ‘roots’ are providing his prosperity, which I don’t find even slightly insightful or new).

I see nothing in the first line other than exposition, and while walking ‘over / the same tilting slope’ could have further meaning, I don’t see it.  I don’t see anything insightful in the distant creek ‘flashing / its signal mirror through gaps in the trees,’ even though it sounds nice, nor how its sounds are carried on the wind.  Further, when it says that the man ‘knows that in the mesh of leaves beside him, / under the hornworm’s path, a mortuary darkness waits,’ I suspect that this suggests he’s considering his own mortality and what will follow this ‘summer’ of life, but this does nothing for me; the image isn’t quite articulate enough for me to see it through his eyes, and I don’t feel even a bit of what he’s feeling.

I love how ‘the rain shreds the afternoon’s clumped heat’ and how ‘it drips / off the ribs of the drooping leaves’ with the double-meaning of the word ‘ribs,’ but I don’t particularly feel the rain.  I applaud the language and how pretty it is, but I move on.

I go through the poem–and I try to read all of them with this attention to detail, because I know that’s what I have to do to read poetry well–but I don’t see insights; I see pretty images, beautiful language, and clichéd insights.  I suppose these clichéd insights are getting in my way; it’s clear that this first section of the book, at least, is about the land and the tobacco culture more than a person in general.  Perhaps I should be able to enjoy the poetry for those images and the excellent language, but I continue with the impression that I’m bad at reading poetry–that I’m noticing all the wrong things or that I’m not yet skilled enough to notice the insight–and this prevents me from enjoying those excellent moments very much.

I know this sounds a little bit like complaining about poetry, but that hasn’t been my intent at all.  I still enjoy those excellent moments the poetry offers–just not as much as I suspect I could.  I should’ve known that going through this wouldn’t guide me to any significant insights about the way I read poetry because of the insight I’ve already had about it: I suspect that the only way to become good at reading poetry is to practice it continually.  So I have no conclusions for this; my intention hasn’t been met.  That said, I think this has been good to articulate my thoughts on poetry as I’ve been reading it so far this semester as, hopefully, I can go back to this at the end of the semester and fill in the gaps I’ve left open.