Poetry as Memory

As an age group, the elderly seem happier than other age groups.

For some time I have been saying that I think poetry is memory.  It seems a superficial statement, yet in the enormous breadth of poetry and poets I think there may be a niche for a definition as glib as this.

Evan S. Connell’s novels Mr. and Mrs. Bridge read (to me) like snapshots in a family album.   There is a beginning, middle, and an end, to the album, but the photos themselves are self-contained.  Some are in color, some in black and white, but what links these pictures together is not that they fall on a timeline, but rather that they give a sense of the person over time who, here and there, appears in the pictures.

And just as someone might go through a shoe box of photographs and pick a few winners to put in the photo album on a Sunday afternoon when no one else is around, my poems about Goffstown, NH and Thailand (for the most part) seem similar to these snaps.  One might say that this is a lonely and self-indulgent exercise.  I would agree, but I don’t see this as a negative criticism.  First, the creation of art is a lonely type of work, and second, even though the artist may not appear in the work, the artist is an important part, too.  We may be captivated or bored by the pictures, but the person selecting and pasting in the pictures is what we ultimately come away with.  If the reader sees something of himself in the poetry, so much the better, but if the artist doesn’t see something of himself in the poem, there probably isn’t much art.

Natasha Trethewey has talked about the poem as “the made thing.”  There is a lot of craft that goes into making any art, but there is a lot of spontaneity, too.  A picture in a fashion magazine may be the end result of a dozen or more technicians and take a day to produce.  A poem is produced by one person and is. more often than not, spontaneous.  The fashion photographer may be operating to a dead line, but not the poet.  The metaphor I am mashing up here is that there is a formal poetry (like the fashion picture) and the free verse poetry (like the snapshot).  Both can be works of art and self-contained, but as an artist I prefer the snapshot in the album over the picture in a magazine.  And here, for me, Ms. Trethewey’s “made thing” breaks down.   It is good for half the poetry in the world, less so for the other half.

Most would stipulate that poetry has to have formal metrics and rhyme schemes to be called poetry.  Yet much of the poetry being written today is in free verse and all but devoid of these formal accoutrements.  Instead free verse is more at (if I can borrow a dictionary term) direct speech, surprise and spontaneity. One of the reasons poetry has lost its seat at the family table is that lines of free verse don’t get stuck in the craw (as I think Robert Frost once claimed as his goal) as

easily as rhymed and structure poems.  Free verse has found some life in the super-heated, jack’s-alive and often competitive poetry readings put on by book stores and coffee shops (can I her some finger snapping here), but for the most part free verse is not a performance art form.   

Poetry, which is still the master art in my opinion, doesn’t sell books and no longer appears in newspapers.  Every year the Bangkok Post, an English language paper in Thailand, asks readers to take a survey on how they might improve the newspaper and every year I suggest they should print poetry.  I might get a more positive response by breaking wind a social gathering, though, because they would never consider such a radical idea.  Let me just say if I were an editor, I wouldn’t print poetry, either.   My suggestion, I know, is just a cry for help.

So in this conflicted wasteland why write poetry at all?  Here I can suggest a new twist.

Poetry and Dementia 

I have read stories which posit that older people tend to be happier than younger groups.  Recently, given all my problems and misgivings (health, money, family, politics . . . the list goes on) I had to admit that I am probably happier now (soon to be 72) than at any other time in my life.  Go figure.  I am perplexed by this.

I think it is possible that writing poetry feeds into my sense of happiness.  I usually get into a poem by “seeing” something - something that grows possibilities, almost like the kiss which makes doors open one on top of another as in the Alfred Hitchcock movie Spellbound (?).  I consider my poems to be much like snapshots in an album, which makes my theory of poetry as memory seem plausible to me.  And because I take these snapshots with words, using a different part of the brain than the space for recording images, writing poetry, unlike reading poetry, may be an inoculation against forgetfulness and even dementia.

Here I append a poem from my blog.

I write poems to get better  

I write poems to get better

although from what, or at what,

or for whatever reason I haven’t

got a clue, but better is how I feel

when days or years later the lines

run their course again and like

a therapy I am my old self once more.

  FG          3/5/2017

I see the above poem is five years old and my notes even include a reference to Evan S. Connell.  Seems as if I have been on this poetry is memory kick for a long time.  That I seem to already have forgotten this poem is not a good sign.  Maybe the Alzheimer’s has already taken hold.

In lieu of sending cards and flowers for my birthday, the family (primarily in the visage of my unhappy wife) wishes you send hard cash.

paypal.me/PoetryfromThailand