I had read this before Bob. The bit about having stored in your memory
pieces of poem or wholepoems rings very true for me. Iwas educated at an old
style Grammar School where learning a piece of poetry or Shakespeare was
homework and tested later.I have retained all that and many of the songs I
learned as a younger boy. from J Barrington Gould's collection of English
Folk Music.
When waiting for my canoe in the Solomons when waiting seemed forever and
the canoe didnt come and the sea lapped on the jetty I would sit and recite
Gaunts Death bed  speech.or Tam o'Shanter Or sing " The Raggle Taggle
Gypsies" or "Fox he would a-wooing go,with his harum -scarum
tiddle -me-darum,Wipsy diddle e dandy -o" and the kids would come out of
hiding and sit and listen to me. It works swell!!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Cooper" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2002 1:59 PM
Subject: Fwd: interestin...


> This was sent to me, I thought, as I read further into it, it become more
> and more interesting... whaddya think?
>
>
> >NEGOTIATING THE DARKNESS
> >Article in New York Times on January 14, 2002
> >By MARY KARR
> >
> >
> >The events of Sept. 11 nailed home many of my basic convictions,
including
> >the notion that lyric poetry
> >dispenses more relief - if not actual salvation - during catastrophic
times
> >than perhaps any art form.
> >
> >After the disaster, we did what perhaps most families did. We prayed in
> >gratitude and fury and desperate petition. We watched hours of news. And
we
> >read poetry. I probably faxed
> >more copies of poems - and received more faxes from other devoted
readers -
> >in the following weeks than I had in years, though as a professor at
> >Syracuse University, I essentially butter my biscuit with the reading of
> >poetry.
> >
> >The diverse crowd of readers I swapped poems with encompassed colleagues,
> >secretaries and administrators; but also The New York Times's
conservative
> >columnist William Safire; the poet Sharon Olds; my agent, Amanda Urban;
my
> >godson's parents in England; neighbors; the novelists Salman Rushdie and
> >Don DeLillo; and my insurance-selling sister.
> >
> >The first poems I turned to were those of fury. The political satires the
> >Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert lobbed against Soviet oppression dispensed a
> >particularly warming fire. In "The Monster of Mr. Cogito" (translated by
> >John and Bogdana Carpenter), he poses as a chivalrous figure fighting not
a
> >dragon but an invisible enemy, "The shimmering of nothingness." Mr.
> >Cogito's monster very much resembles the one behind the World Trade
Center
> >attack:
> >
> >it is difficult to describe
> >escapes definition
> >it is like
> >an immense depression
> >spread out over the country
> >it can't be pierced
> >with a pen
> >with an argument
> >or a
> >spear.
> >
> >
> >We only know the monster by "it's suffocating weight/and the death it
sends
> >down." The fury I felt at the invisible enemy was embodied in the
> >hilarious, almost Quixote-esque figure of Mr. Cogito walking out at dawn:
> >
> >carefully equipped
> >with a long sharp object
> >he calls to
> >the monster
> >on the empty streets
> >he offends the monster
> >provokes the monster . . .
> >he calls -
> >come out
> >contemptible coward
> >
> >But just as we still stare helpless into our television screens, hoping
for
> >some glimpse of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, so this eager knight peers
> >into fog, seeing only "the huge snout of nothingness."
> >
> >European poets like Herbert who endured war have resounded the loudest
and
> >longest in these months. Asked to read for The New Yorker's benefit
shortly
> >after the attacks, I struggled with whether or not to include the
Holocaust
> >survivor Paul Celan's agonized poem about the digging in mass graves
> >(translated from German by Michael Hamburger). It was somber and furious
> >with the God whose universe contained the graves' possibility:
> >
> >There was earth inside them, and
> >they dug.
> >They dug and
> >they dug, so their day
> >went by for them, their night. And they did not praise God,
> >
> >who, so they heard, wanted all this,
> >who, so they heard, knew all this.
> >They dug and heard
> >nothing more;
> >they did not grow wise, invented no song,
> >thought up for themselves no language.
> >They dug.
> >
> >The cadence of the poem drummed out the relentless dirge of a people's
> >grief, but was it perhaps too dark? The digging at ground zero was only
> >blocks away, and perhaps the poem would fall on the audience like another
> >blow.
> >
> >The editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, ultimately persuaded me to
> >read it. He reminded me that its conclusion suggests not just digging
> >toward the lost, but also a collective digging into history, how one
person
> >in despair and loneliness digs toward the salvation of someone else. The
> >poem concludes with a moment of awakening, the sound of a ring striking
> >metal as one human being reaches another.
> >
> >On one, o none, o no one, o you:
> >Where did the way lead
> >when it led nowhere?
> >O you dig, and I dig, and I dig towards you,
> >and on our
> >finger the ring awakes.
> >
> >Poetry is about such instantaneous connection - one person groping from a
> >dark place to meet with another in an instant that strikes fire.
> >
> >After the benefit, strangers wrote in gratitude for the Celan poem,
though
> >I regretted not being able to include Whitman's long passage from "I Sing
> >the Body Electric," which describes the body in its various attitudes of
> >beauty and in this section winds up with firefighters, whose recent
courage
> >we as a country have been so star-struck by.
> >
> >
> >But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in
> >his face,
> >It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the
> >joints of his hips and wrists,
> >It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of
> >his waist and knees, dress does not hide him. . . .
> >The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of
> >masculine muscle through clean- setting trousers and
> >waist-straps,
> >The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell
> >strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert,
> >The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the
> >curved neck and the counting. . . .
> >Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with the wrestlers, march
> >in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count.
> >
> >Memoir has permitted me to relay to readers the yards of intricate
> >information I could never roll into a lyric poem, but prose never works
in
> >a reader's mind with poetry's instant infusion of feeling.
> >
> >Poetry is economical. And for the gravely pained, swift relief is of the
> >essence. A poem's brevity touches most readers when the mental focus
> >required by a lengthy prose work just won't do. The poet Philip Larkin
once
> >wrote that the reader puts the penny of attention into the poem's slot
and
> >immediately gets a feeling as payoff.
> >
> >A short poem is also, arguably, the most portable art form. Maybe
pianists
> >can recall whole concertos note by note, or painters can evoke in their
> >minds the most subtle brush strokes. From a great novel a few sentences
> >might linger, a character or scene. But those are abbreviations, not the
> >novel itself.
> >
> >Only lyric poetry yields the artwork in its entirety, anytime, anywhere.
> >And it arrives in common language - the same tool we use to get gas
pumped
> >into a dry tank. While standing in a bank teller's long line, I can rerun
a
> >whole sonnet in my head and enjoy a rush of tenderness that sometimes
> >disperses my impatience as if a wand had been waved. The act plugs me
into
> >the great invisible company of Shakespeare or Dickinson.
> >
> >It's strange that an act so solitary - reciting a silent poem - can
invoke
> >that sense of being drawn into the human community. Long works of prose
are
> >rabbit holes that let me vanish from this world into alternate realms.
But
> >lyric poetry's alchemy yields for me a strange and sudden kinship with
the
> >actual world and its citizens.
> >
> >Since the bombings, I've turned perhaps most often to the work of the
> >90-year-old Polish exile and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz. In "On
Prayer,"
> >translated here by former poet laureate Robert Hass, Mr. Milosz bestows a
> >way to pray onto even the most faithless.
> >
> >You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
> >All I know
> >is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
> >And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
> >Above
> >landscapes the color of ripe gold
> >Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
> >That bridge
> >leads to the shore of Reversal
> >Where everything is just the opposite and the word is
> >
> >Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
> >Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
> >Feels
> >compassion for those tangled in the flesh
> >And knows that if there is no others shore
> >We will walk
> >that aerial bridge all the same.
> >
> >James Joyce once said that everyone starts out as a poet, then realizes
> >it's too hard. For those of us with the hubris to keep writing verses
that
> >will seldom reach the exalted status the great works do (much less buy
> >dinner or cover a mortgage), there's a great joy in the absurdity of
one's
> >enterprise. It's the joy derived from true wonder at poetry's redemptive
> >quality, like taking your Little League
> >slugger bat into the cathedral of Yankee Stadium.
> >
> >Here I stand, bat cocked, ready for whatever impossible pitch history
> >flings. It may be a presumptuously comic posture, but the cathedral
itself
> >offers me the constant consolations of magnificence.
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
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