The One
In conversations with many different poets, I have noticed, on many occasions, that many poets can trace back and name the poem that first took hold of them, excited them beyond anything they could remember before, the poem that elicited almost a conversion reaction. Of course, there are some who just slowly fell into poetry, but I am always fascinated by "the one" poem. And no, I don't love the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and such things. But "the one" poem fascinates me.
I can tell you exactly when and where I encountered "the one." I was a Junior in high school, and we all took English Literature in that year. Somewhere, near the end of the year, we were assigned to read some of Yeats' poems. I can still remember the experience. There was "Lapis Lazuli" and "Sailing to Byzantium," but then there was "The Second Coming." I read it and was completely shocked. I think I read it 10 or 12 times in a row. I had never read a poem like it. I was completely bowled over. When I went to class the next day and the teacher (Kathy Doody, yes, that really was her name) asked for a volunteer to read it, I threw my hand up so fast I thought I would dislocate my shoulder. And then, when I read it out loud, I was even more shocked. It mesmerized the room. The sound of it. It was something as close to heaven as I could imagine. At the time, I never imagined I would ever be a poet, but I think, deep inside, I wanted to make something like that poem. I wanted to make my own poem like it. Even years after first encountering "The Second Coming," I would occasionally sneak a peak at it and marvel at it. I wanted to know how it worked. What made it tick? Who was this man named Yeats? How does one make something that can live and affect other people?
Years later, in college, when I dropped out of painting, I decided to take a poetry workshop. I think I believed a single workshop would open a secret door to making poems. It didn't. But it started me down a path that now, in retrospect, seems utterly inevitable. I need to write poems. I need to engage with language and image and all the intricacies that underly poetry. I may never write a poem like "The Second Coming," but god damn it, I will keep trying.
Another nice thing about that poem? When I first started dating Jacob, before I knew he had read any poetry at all, we were walking across downtown on our way to dinner. A hawk's shadow slipped across the street and I said: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre..." Jacob, without even a 5-second pause, responded: "The falcon cannot hear the falconer." I looked at him with what had to be shock on my face. And then, in sync, we both said: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world..." I knew, right then and there, he was "the one."
In your past, do you have a poem like "The Second Coming" lurking? For you, what was "The One"?
posted by C. Dale @ 10:42 AM
14 comments
14 Comments:
Great story, Dale!
My "one" happened my senior year of high school, when I had a major crush on my Honors English teacher, who was also the football coach. One day he passed out a typed and mimeographed poem and read it to the class. He had an incredible reading voice and presence, and the poem was "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I had no idea, at the time, who T. S. Eliot was, and the poem totally blew me away. It was so dreamlike, and mysterious, and musical, and haunting; and full of this unrequited desperate love. It was as if the top of my head and the front of my chest had been lifted off and this brilliant beam of light was pouring into my body. I felt as if the poet were speaking directly to me, saying the words that were _in me_. I had that sense of utter connection with a work of art. And I wanted to read everything T S Eliot had written; and I wanted to be able to write things like he had, that would influence others in that way.
I never hit it off with teacher . . . LOL . . . but I have a great and wonderful partner of 18 years, though not a poet, who does just fine for me!
best,
Peter
I know it is probably the most obvious, but no other poem could touch "Fern Hill" for me. I suppose I was around fifteen. Dylan Thomas must've had that kind of hold over millions of teenagers. The sheer magic of the lines: "And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns" and "Golden in the mercy of his means," just the rhythm, the music of it astounded me.
"The One" probably has as much to do with that stage of development as anything. Before that, I couldn't get enough of Coleridge, after that Pound and Villon, after that Hughes &c. Though it was ideal for a time and place (growing up in a somewhat similar landscape as the one "Fern Hill" describes) it should be said that I still cannot find much in the way of a flaw in that poem. Reading it today, I don't get the same feeling; yet, the feeling I get is just as profound. It seems to get better as I get older, more nostalgic.
It is a funny thing how poems can do that on such a personal level. I'd wager that someone born and raised in Los Angeles or Barcelona might find the odd abstractions. For those of us who had that type of childhood around field crops and animals, I'd say every word is absolute, concrete. There may be a Celtic angle to that type of understanding as well. No matter.
Aside from buying an LP of "A Child's Christmas in Wales" two years ago, I haven't opened a book of Dylan's since 1998 nor thought a tremendous amount about him. I think I'd enjoy a reacquaintance. Thanks for the post.
Nostrovia.
For me, I think the "one" poem would have to be a haiku by (I think) Buson that a teacher said out loud in high school:
This piercing cold I feel
my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom
under my heel
That's the only translation I can find at the moment, but what's interesting is I swear the translation the teacher recited said nothing about a dead wife or, for that matter, piercing cold. It simply said something like "Sweeping the floor I find an old comb." And precisely what made it so powerful was that it conveyed all the intensity of grief and love *without* saying anything directly. I definitely felt pierced and never got over it.
"The Second Coming," was the one for me too. I came across it in an unexpected way. I opened Joan Didion's book of essays "Slouching Towards Bethleham," and "The Second Coming," was the preface; that's how I met Yeats. I can't accurately describe what happened to me that day, it was as if something deep within me, shut and locked all my life, cracked open.
The story you shared about Jacob was so romantic and beautiful. It made me a little misty. :-)
Hard to say about “the One”; it’s more like the Many, but I think it was one written by my dad titled “Reply”. He wrote it sometime in the sixties when he was a merchant marine onboard the cruise ship “Cabo San Vicente” and it was a reply to an officer’s challenge poem, which asked, in essence, how the world had been created. Not a bad challenge poem actually. It was supposed to be impossible to reply to and I was simply amazed—guess I was in high school when I first read it—that my dad could actually come up with a reply that blew away the other poem. (I actually met that officer onboard in Barcelona and I remember them kidding each other about the challenge.) My dad later encouraged me to try my hand at poetry, but I was simply incapable of understanding what that world was all about. The magic of it for me was the thought of these guys at sea with nothing better to do to entertain themselves, but to write poems to one another. To draft them, to correct them and to recite them. Little did I know what it truly meant to them. All those sunrises.
Alberto
James Dickey's Falling when it first appeared in the New Yorker. I was in the 7th grade at Our Lady of Perpetual Help and I was so astounded by the poem that I can still remember what I was wearing, and where I was sitting and who I was sitting next to in the class room when I read it. I'm still astounded by it.
I blogged about this last week or so, I think. Mine was probably Margaret Atwood's
"you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye"
It was the first poem I read that wasn't lofty and grand and Poetic. It was simple and only obliquely to its point. I loved the turn from the ultimate romantic sentiment to one of complete violation. I probably read this sandwhiched between things like Hardy's "The Oxen" and Gwendolyn Brooks's "We Real Cool," so it stood out to me.
Yes, I know I should be (I am) embarrassed to post this. The first poem that knocked me out was Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Renascence." Speaking of lofty. But hey, I was the person voted "most idealistic" in my high school yearbook, a category they made up just for me. This is the last stanza of "Renascence."
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.
My next fave rave, though, was Dylan Thomas. Freshman year of college I went around reciting Fern Hill under my breath. People gave me a wide berth.
After that, it was Eliot's Four Quartets. We recited the last four lines of that in our wedding (1976)--me sobbing, of course.
I went on about this a bit on my blog today; there was no One Poem, only the One Teacher, who exposed me to all kinds of wonderful material. But I feel the same way as you about "The Second Coming". It's tops on my "wish I'd written it" list, and still gives me shivers down the spine.
It's so hard to look back 20 years and pick just one! I wrote a lot from 7-11th grades, then got away from it for a while, then came back. The first time, I was brought around by poems I loved to say aloud (and still do): Jabberwocky and Kubla Khan come to mind. The music of the words is still dominant for me, though in college I began to expect a little more of the stories my favorite poems told. I think Robinson's "Richard Corey" was my wakeup call, though it was "The Emperor of Ice Cream" that actually got me out of bed.
I read an interesting essay that suggested that you could define poets according to *which* line in "The Second Coming" was the one that really knocked them out: there are "Turning and turning in the widening gyre" poets, "the worst are full of passionate intensity" poets, "slouching toward Bethlehem" poets (I think I'm one of these), etc. Robert
I read a lot of great poems, "Second Comming" included, in my first year as an aspiring poet in college. Unfortunately, I was learning to read as well as write poetry (I'm pretty sure I had barely an eight grade reading level thanks to my poor, let anyone graduate school), so I'm sure potential "ones" flew by me several times.
Then, one day during winter or summer break, I read "On The Meeting of Hart Crane and Garcia Lorca" by Philip Levine in New Yorker on the way to work with my father (I'm starting to think that all Levine should be read on the way to work). That was the one that spurred me to archive favorite poems from the magazine and in general(this doesn't happen so much as far as The New Yorker is concerned. I was a big enough moron to throw the issue out though, which I kick myself for now even though I have it as part of "The Simple Truth."
Nuts. Almost forgot the link:
http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/levine/meeting.html
Chad, I had not read this poem by Levine before. It really is a gorgeous poem. I love the way Levine can thread a narrative through a lyric poem.
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