If articles on humour in business magazines are written humorously, (they all are) then I guess an essay called Poetry Matters should be written poetically. Ya, but I’m only human, and my deadline is tonight—after I’ve done some socializing, including (“but not limited to” interjects my panicky lawyer) being outside on lawn chairs with folks my own age from my condominium association—including (but not panicking) two buildings and a grassy knoll: “Condo” is short for “co-dominion” over the land. (Hence, during my boyhood, Canadians celebrated their “Dominion Day” every First of July)
I found a BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) web article that states poetry is being removed from the school curriculum, AND that there are good reasons, seven of them, for keeping poetry in schools. While reporters, “just the facts Ma’am,” aren’t known for their poetic side, the folks they quoted and “YouTube embedded” are all convinced that poetry matters. Me too—and I suspect most BBC staff would agree.
Here’s the link. I doubt the BBC folk expect you to consume (read and hear) their story all in one sitting, so please don’t put false expectations of time on yourself.
I could stop this post right here…
…but vanity says I should write an article too. Please don’t think you have to read my own post all in one sitting either, although the “gimmick” for my blog is that all essays are under 900 words.
As for reporters, I remember a student cartoon of three bus riders: The first two are thinking, “Cloudy, looks like rain.” The third is thinking, “I wish I were Earnest Hemingway.” It was a recruiting advertisement for the university student newspaper, the Gauntlet, an ad that maybe missed the poetic literary crowd, but “targeted” the practical short sentence crowd. Like me.
Of course student papers don’t publish poetry. Why? Besides favouring news, there is the human factor: A brand new reporter may have some objectivity, some glimmering that he needs to be edited. A new poet? No-o-o-o.
I walked into the Gauntlet, and a few years later I’m not only an experienced reporter, but I’m a drop-in at the Disabled Students Club. Where I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone they had the only television set on campus, hidden around the corner so passing TABs wouldn’t see it. Eh? TAB means temporarily able bodied. “Temporary” is why my condo suite is on the ground floor, needing no stairs or elevator.
My “differently abled” peers wanted to put into the Gauntlet a section of their compositions about being disabled. So I made a two page spread of their works. This after I talked my editor into it, after first warning the earnest students their pieces would be heavily edited, but then in reality I edited lightly, if at all. (The public is overly fragile about editing, hence a wise reporter never shows her sources her article until after it is printed)
My editor, manly like Hemingway, was majoring in engineering, not English. He didn’t think we should publish any disabled poetry in our newspaper. I corrected him, stressing that any hurting minority group always includes poetry in their newsletters and such, because prose can give the facts, but poetry can give the feelings about the facts. The section ran with all poetry intact.
As for engineering, three longhaired counterculture types are on the cover of The Drifters, by James Michener. Years before the novel opens, a student is told by his engineering professor that he will be given credit for each poem he memorizes. So he does. Years later this pays off as the engineer finds himself in a remote jungle outpost. Where he eventually meets the drifters.
No doubt our ancestors memorized songs, as we do today, but I know from their memoirs and fiction they memorized poetry too. I get it. There is something special about poetry, even if you live in a crowded city with modern distractions. I too have benefited from memorizing poems.
Maybe memorizing is not something people talk about. One day I was at a big communications job fair in the ballroom on campus. I walked around quite relaxed, enjoying my communication peers, because I already had a job. As for campus people, there was only one booth —actually a six foot table—staffed by two paid graduate students, English majors, who were working on translating Old English. Pre-Chaucer. Maybe I came on as too loudly extroverted, too judgemental, because they both denied memorizing poetry, at first, but then as we warmed up one man admitted he had indeed memorized.
… Back when I was a young bachelor, more hormonal and more lonely, I would almost weep, up late at night, over old poetry that rhymed. For several decades now, the exciting new improved stuff hasn’t rhymed, but for any newcomer, poems that rhyme may be best, may at first seem more accessible.
When I took a semester of poetry at community college, we didn’t take things like symbolism, allusions or themes. “Then you were taught right!” said a professor of poetry. This summer, out on your lawn chair, if you don’t have to analyze poetry for school… then you can just relax and enjoy reading poems as part of a good life.
Sean Crawford
August 2020
Last blog, Sir Michael Caine recited Kipling.
Any comments?
