"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."
William Butler Yeats
Through not-surprising inattention, I missed that yesterday was Yeats' birthday. My thanks to Susan T. Landry for the reminder and the poem she shared. In another life, century and state-of-mind, I was a student in Modern Poetry 101. It was there that I met Yeats and there that I was taught the only way to appreciate poetry was to know precisely what the poet meant in every word, phrase, pause, line break and nuance. It should have been called Deconstruction 101 and it nearly ruined poetry for me and me for it. I suspect the baffling process of snipping, with finely-pointed embroidery scissors, all the stitches out of art quilts made of words contributed to a once long-held belief that my brain was not quite equal to the task of participating.
Then, in a new century and with luck the leprechauns would envy, my heart was yanked back to Yeats and others previously unknown. Catapulted into the midst of an ongoing banquet hosted with patience and generosity by poets around the world, I learned that I could appreciate Yeats in my unscholarly fashion and not be wrong. I met a friend, a mentor who invited me to love the words I loved for how they spoke to, how they moved me, as I remained often clueless about the intent or the back story.
Being a day behind the celebrating of Mr. Yeats is a forgivable omission. Surely there are poets born on June 14. We may not know their names; we don't need to. We can thank them in their anonymity for all the ways they make our lives richer, for the fact they may overlook our possibly uninformed personal and emotional responses to their work. Happy Birthday, poets.
“The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.”
― Jane Kenyon
10 comments:
i so enjoy how you write and what you write about!
--susan
Susan - Thank you. The feeling is mutual. xo
Happy Birthday Mr. Yeats and hello to you my friend....popping in to say HI....hugs too.
My 'Yes' to Susan's words, dear Marylinn (and yours to her, too.) Happy Birthday, Poets. May every day be a poetry day. Jane Kenyon's right, of course - we cannot live without it. xo
Yeats was wonderful.
O yes, how grand to come back and find delight. My brief academic study of poetry made me want to strangle the teacher.
But I'd discovered on my own as a teen, e.e.cummings and Burroughs and Ginsberg and Dylan Thomas. Some of it was incomprehensible to me but I allowed the words to wash me because they were silky and strung together differently from anything else I'd encountered. Seductive. Later Rumi and Neruda and James Tate and Will Stafford and Dean Young and Sharon Olds and so many others. So by the time I was in college (in my 50's!) I knew why poetry mattered to me, why all art was essential; the time alone making art so private, personal and necessary. And in the West, we have it backward. We work all the time and create very little. Our artists starve. Imagine having Vaclav Havel, a poet, as the head of state. Imagine.
Donna - Hello and hugs back to you. Thanks for stopping by. I know Mr. Yeats appreciates your wishes. xo
Claire - Thank you. It is not even worth thinking about, living without poetry. I love how here in the blog world we come upon familiar or unfamiliar writings like an oasis where we can linger and let the grit and weariness fall away. xo
Laoch - I KNOW. And you can imagine my joy at knowing I had not lost him through what seemed my own insufficiency. The world continues to amaze. xo
Beth - Before the poetry incident, there had been a commercial art class which drove me to journalism. I could not have guessed art and the poets would wait for me.
I was less confident in my own responses and needed a knowing voice to tell me I didn't have it wrong. I'd mistrusted intuition for so long. We do have IT, everything that goes into being IT, so backward. I marvel when we show writers and artists on postage stamps and I'm sure there are citizens who take offense. Yes, imagine a poet as head of state. No speech writers needed. Thank you for this. xo
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