A Chance Clearance Rack Encounter

By Peter Nevland - Jan 19 , 2010

The clearance shelves at Borders sat begging in the doorway this weekend, and I in my pity obliged them. Atlases, old novels, weapons, and armor pleaded for my attention. A collection of old conquerors briefly captured my gaze, but failed in their attempt to assault my wallet. I didn’t expect to find anything meaningful and lowered my expectations further upon sighting the pile of poetry books proclaiming their greatly reduced price.

Surely these 100 Poems to Lift Your Spirits contained easy themes and corny lyrics. Any book that promised to “leave readers happier and enriched for having read them” was surely worthy of my disdain. The first page I flipped open confirmed my assumptions. Its words lay there plain and boring, reminding me of the poem Elizabeth Alexander used to put everyone to sleep at Barack Obama’s inauguration. I spat out the forgetful verse, lips dripping with fully sarcastic tones.

But something happened that I didn’t expect. I flipped through pages again, intending more ridicule to follow my first victim, but instead discovered the mastery of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Maybe it was simply a style of bygone times but his commitment to elegant phrasing combined with simple flowing rhyme schemes hooked my fancy and surprised me at the end with meaning. “Vicki will love this,” I thought, as I spied my girlfriend reading alone at a table in the coffee shop.

A few steps brought my backside to its happy place of rest across from her, and within seconds torrents of poetry flew to her ears. Yeats, Frost, Wordsworth, Holmes and Ehrmann set her eyes sparkling and my smile dancing. We stayed too long there, testing the patience of our friends Zach and Christa, who sat with seatbelts buckled when we finally emerged from the spell of words to join them in their car.

“What just happened?” I thought. “What was the difference between that first, more recently penned, lame poem I read and those other, older works that served up a feast of delight?” “Why has poetry suffered its relegation to elite academic circles, discount clearance racks, or underground spoken word competitions?”

To start, let’s look at the first few lines of Elizabeth Alexander’s inauguration poem last January:

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

“Grab their attention,” I tell the kids in my writing workshops. “You’ve got to start with a strong mental image that forces them to listen to you.” This opening does nothing of that. She may have won awards and published five books of poetry, but her attempt to celebrate the ordinary and everyday only makes it seem trite and mundane.

I want her to ignite my imagination with furtive glances, winks and smiles, plunging me into the life of the city within 5 seconds of walking down the street. She could have let the cold detachment in the wind scrape our fragile cheeks, or warmed our bones with the memory of friendship’s greeting. Instead it’s walking, speaking, and business, asking us if we really care about listening or not.

Look at the difference in the opening lines of Robert Frost’s “Rose Pogonias”:

A SATURATED meadow,
Sun-shaped and jewel-small,
A circle scarcely wider
Than the trees around were tall;

With fewer words than Alexander used, the meadow sparkles with flowers, color, and intimacy. I don’t know where it’s going or what it means, but the sound of it sets my brain spinning with possibility. That’s an opening.

With the reader or listener (since poetry really should be heard aloud) so engaged, a writer can sneak all sorts of themes and meaning in unnoticed. Dr. Seuss did it in his children’s books. Our minds bop away to his anapestic rhythms while he teaches us to try new things, to appreciate each other’s differences, or to save the environment. Focusing on the quality of your writing makes whatever opinion you have (and every writer is trying to convey an opinion) much less jarring, and more acceptable to the reader when it appears.

By the time Elizabeth Alexander asked the question, “What if the mightiest word is love?” no one was listening. Either that or they had suspected its appearance, because their imaginations weren’t occupied with the power of her imagery. When Robert Frost says, “We raised a simple prayer before we left the spot, that in the general mowing that place might be forgot,” we’ve already tasted the sweetness and purity of his vision. His longing for the preservation of his meadow becomes our own.

It seems someone has convinced us that some high secret enables privileged individuals to appreciate “good poetry.” Why can’t we just like what delights our ears? With hands straining to grasp the summits of knowledge, we’ve seized upon the foolishness of intellectual exaltation. Students hear their teachers explain rhyme structure, meter, and poetic devices rather than explode with the passion of vivid, dream-inducing, spine-tingling writing. We end up penning things like:

I sat at the keyboard typing,
Feeling like going to war.

instead of

My fingers blazed up the keyboard,
Jamming and mashing the letters in a percussive war dance.

Who sold us this lie of clever reserve? Who filled our bellies with the dissatisfaction of mundane phrases in a clever arrangement?

Words remain as powerful as the days when families used to recite poetry around the dinner table or the centuries that storytellers recited epic battles and spiritual wisdom in the flickering light of fire. Poetry locked Vicki and I in an embrace of words when we only expected trite platitudes.

Let’s hope the inspiration of future generations of writers rests on more than a chance discovery amidst the piles of the clearance rack.