Here’s something that makes me crazy: I know
dozens of readers – smart, informed, enthusiastic readers of fiction and
non-fiction of all kinds – who are afraid of poetry. Who fear they “don’t get
it.” If you are one of those people, this book is for you.
I’m
not going to try to make a case for why poetry matters. I’m going to just work
from the assumption that poetry matters. It matters to me. It matters to the
thirty-six poets included here. And it probably matters to you; if you don’t think
poetry matters, you wouldn’t have bought or borrowed or stolen this book. So we’ll
leave the generalizations about poetry to others. Ultimately I can’t say I get
very excited about trying to define what poetry is. I’m more interested in what poetry can do. So while I’m not
going to be afraid to get a little professorial if a term or technique needs
some explanation or context, I’m going to do my very best to steer clear of big
sweeping generalizations. (“INTRODUCTION”)
I’m
rather impressed by Toronto poet Adam Sol’s How A Poem Moves: A Field Guide for Readers of Poetry (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2019),
a book that seems to have emerged rather organically out of his experience as a
juror for the Griffin Poetry Prize for 2015. As he writes in his introduction: “As
the process progressed, I kept thinking, How can I make use of all this good
reading? How can I shed light on some of these other books that aren’t making
it to the shortlists? There were terrific books that had to be put aside. Even uneven
books often had stellar poems inside them. And I wanted to find a way to
revisit them once the whirlwind of the jurying process was complete.” Sol’s
response, then, was to start a blog around talking about individual poems, attempting to post a new essay every two weeks (I remember when the site began,
and I was enthused and curious about it, although the distractions of young
children prevented me from properly exploring the posts), and the thirty-five short
essays included in this collection exist as a “best of” (a recent exploration of the site also reveals further activity, including a handful of guest-posts).
There
is something delightfully casual about Sol’s observations, one that doesn’t sacrifice
critical acumen or scholarly purpose, but one that can be enjoyed by both the
casual reader and literary insider, and his list of subjects move outward from
his own reading interest to the wider literary community, from clear literary
heroes Philip Levine, Deborah Digges and C.K. Williams to the work of his
friends and contemporaries, including Jeff Latosik, Ali Blythe, Donna Stonecipher, Bren Simmers, Shannon Maguire, Soraya Peerbaye and Liz Howard. The
strength of the collection comes from his extensive knowledge, written in such
a way as to allow everyone in, as in this excerpt from his essay on a poem by Toronto poet and editor Damian Rogers:
Despite what literary scholars and theorists
have been telling us for decades, it’s still a common natural impulse when
reading lyric poetry to look for the poet’s authentic experience in the subject
matter. Knowing that Plath, Sexton, and Berryman all committed suicide adds a
certain aura of authenticity to the anguish in their poems. But are poets under
any obligation to deliver this kind of confession? Can we still be moved by a
powerful poem about, say, a father’s death, if a poet writes while both his
parents are living? Of course. And yet, we as readers still crave to connect a
poem to the poet’s biography.
I’ve
long wondered why more writers don’t write non-fiction pieces and/or reviews,
even if casually, given the presumption that if you write, you will be naturally
contemplating how other works are composed, and their structures. I am grateful
for this, and am even considering picking up a couple of extra copies, perhaps
for mother-in-law; perhaps for my bookish niece (and it was nice to see a
couple of essays exploring the work of poets whose work I am rather fond of,
including Shannon Maguire, Donna Stonecipher and Liz Howard). I just hope he
considers continuing the series, even if as only an occasional one.
The
biggest hurdle, one could argue, for contemporary poetry is an ongoing
resistance by the general public (one that has to do, in no small part, with
public school educations, I might think), and I suspect that anyone willing to
attempt Sol’s essays would easily be able to begin to engage with what had
previously eluded.
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