The Best Poem

I was reading an article on poetry slams the other day, and it got me to thinking. It got me to thinking how poetry has really fallen off.

I don’t mean to come across as a poetry snob here, but I do have a bit of authority on the subject. I did win not one but two poetry awards. I won the States Viar Poetry Award, 1986 for a sonnet I wrote (an achievement that was particularly nice in that one teacher at my school had called it my “attempt at a sonnet.”) and then I got an honorable mention for that award the next year for my poem “After Homecoming 1986.”

You can try to google that award if you want. I did, and couldn't find anything. I got a scholarship once, too, that also appears not to exist. It seems as though when I win an award, that award soon disappears from view. But I'm not inventing the award.

I still remember the poems, too, a little. Well, not “After Homecoming 1986,” which was a bit of a risqué poem that compared a date to the flash flooding that took place because of rains in the fall of 1986. I remember the subject of that -- who could forget -- but not the wording itself and I don't know where the literary magazine that printed that poem is. I also don't know where the magazine that printed the sonnet is, but I remember most of the sonnet. It was not titled, as sonnets are not. It went, as much as I remember it, like this…

A golden pen did pen these words of mine.
And you so like that golden pen I take,
My calloused hand rough on the smooth gold shine,
As mismatched pair as ever tales shall make.

Upon a piece of sun-fed tree I write
My rough words scratching out for all to see.
While all of those who ever view you might
Believe that Gaea herself does speak for thee.

. . .

(And I can’t remember the third stanza, but it finished up with:)

Yet has it not been said thus long before,
Alikes repel and opposites love more?

I worked and worked on that sonnet. Sonnets have a very deliberate structure - -iambic pentameter and only certain rhyme schemes and they’re about love, not life in the United States or anything. And the sonnet was great (is great) and won an award plus $50, which technically means I got paid for writing (and earned more from that one poem than I’ve earned from all of my writing since then.)

I’ve written other poems, too, some rhyming and some not, but I began my career as a poet by rhyming all of my poems, and I think all other poets should, too. I did that because I liked poetry and I liked writing and I wanted to learn how to do it well. I had the idea to do that because my English teacher, who I will never forget and who was inspirational in my life for this quote as well as for his impression of Aged P in Great Expectations which instilled a love of Charles Dickens in me which eventually led me to read David Copperfield when I was in Morocco, which book was the only book I’ve ever cried when I read, my English teacher told us this anecdote about Ezra Pound.


Wemmick talking to
Aged Parent. ("Aged P"). You do
know what I'm talking about, right?
You've read Great Expectations,
right? Right? Please? People
still read Dickens, don't they?



Ezra Pound. If he were
around today, he'd no doubt
be called E-Pound and have
guest hosted The View.


He-- my English Teacher, not Dickens -- said that Pound wrote a sonnet a day for a year and then destroyed them all before going on to write free verse. (Note to you would-be-poets: not blank verse, which is unrhymed Iambic pentameter and if you don’t know what I mean by that you’re not a poet so stop… free verse, which is what everyone thinks they’re writing nowadays but they’re not.) Pound, my teacher told us, did that so he could learn about rhyme and meter and language and rhythm before deciding to chuck those.



This David Copperfield
did not make me cry.



This one did. And I'm man
enough to admit it.


That was a good instructive lesson, I thought, not just for poetry but for life: Learn the rules and tools and how to use them before you decide which rules need not be followed and which tools can be adapted to something else.

A good lesson for life but a better lesson for poetry, since it is not poetry unless it strikes down at the core of your being and teaches you not just the lesson the poem means to impart (whether that lesson be a silly limerick joke or a deep introspection about the universe) but teaches it in a way that sticks with you for years and years and years, words that pile on each other in such a way that you cannot forget them and their very clinging tenaciousness not only makes them stay with you but makes you want to stay with them. We have to try harder for poetry, because poetry is more than just talking or thinking.

Poetry is our thoughts dressed up for their wedding day.

So that’s what I began thinking about as I read the story about poetry slams, which should have made me happy that people were still writing and reading poetry, but it didn’t because they printed snippets of the winning poems, and I didn’t like the snippets. I couldn’t see that they were any good. They were all free verse – the last refuge of the scoundrel, as it were—and they were largely devoid of any sort of rhythm, any sort of imagery, any flow, any scansion… in short, they were poems that had no poetry to them. I can’t recall even a single line of those poems right now.

Compare that to the lines I do recall of the great poems – my sonnet, for example. Or the beginning of The Raven:

Once upon a midnight dreary
While I pondered weak and weary
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
While I nodded nearly napping
Suddenly there came a tapping
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door-Only this, and nothing more."

Here’s proof of how compelling, memorable, and flowing that opening stanza was: I typed it entirely from memory, and then checked it on a Poe website, and had only forgotten that it was “gently rapping,” rather than “softly rapping.”

Or another short line from Poe:

The tintinnabulation of the bells.

What use of language and meter! Anyone can say ringing, clanging, chiming, pealing. Poe said tintinnabulation. It sounds like bells, ringing clanging chiming and pealing all at once, and it pours all over itself as you say it. It’s fun to say.

And I’m not just hung up on rhyming poems, either. I remember lines from free verse:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

(William Carlos Williams’ The Red Wheelbarrow.). That one’s always stuck with me, too. It doesn’t rhyme. But it does have its own structure – the second line in each verse has two syllables. And it’s use of language is sparse but perfect. Williams paints a picture of vivid colors, but imbues that picture with urgency and exhaustion at the same time: We have to ponder what depends on that wheelbarrow, and are led to picture a farm, its wheelbarrow necessary to a subsistence life, carrying the things the farmer needs to make his family’s home secure and provide them sustenance. So much depends on that wheelbarrow, with so little language to tell us why, resulting in much depending on the words that we are given - -words that are the red wheelbarrow for our thoughts.

Do people even study poetry anymore? Or has our society – so free with its time and so open to all thoughts that people like me can publish their musings to thousands without check – decided that anyone can be a poet?

And maybe anyone can. But not everyone can be a good poet. I think I’m a good poet, but I worked at it. Worked hard at it . And if today’s crop of poets is working at it, it doesn’t show to me, because there are very few great poems being produced nowadays. Great poems are scarce. And bad poems bring me down because the more bad poems there are, the more people will dislike poetry and when poetry dies out we’ll really have lost something.

I wanted to write great poetry, and still do, because great poetry is like all great art: it inspires us and moves us forward as a person, a people, and a civilization. So I read poetry and worked on poetry and thought about poetry, and still do. I learned the rules of poetry and kept at it and still do.

I worked so hard at being a poet, in the end, and wanted to write great poetry when I did, because of The Best Poem, a poem I read and re-read all the time and each time I come away again with new insights into the poem, into poetry, and into life.

This essay has been all about my thoughts on poetry, my poems, and other poets, good and bad (and my English teacher.)(And Charles Dickens.) I could certainly have spent more time talking about The Best Poem, or the poet who wrote it. But everything I could have said would have simply been either gravy on a steak – unnecessary and distracting – or would have the effect of dissecting a butterfly – killing the subject and not learning anything about what really makes it beautiful, which is the way it flutters and reflects light and spreads happiness.

So I’ve spent my time talking about other things as a buildup to presenting The Best Poem. Even after all my work, I’m not qualified to do more than to say this: This is The Best Poem. The way the language is used, the way it presents a whole life story that is everyone's life, the way it picks up a rhythm and rhyme scheme and then every so often sets taht scheme aside the way life will sometimes trip you up, the way it is both personal and quiet and universal and loud, this poem captures the essence of language, of poetry, and of life.

Everyone should read it. If you want to be a poet, you should read this and strive to achieve something even half this good. If you don’t want to be a poet, you should read this because it will make you want to be a poet:

Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town.

e e cummings
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain