This week's #FictionFriday is brought to you by Inge
‘I lie in bed in Europe
alone in old red under
wear symbolic of desire
for union with immortality
but man’s love’s not perfect’
Poetry can touch you, make you wonder, consider, reconsider challenging - controversial - issues. I would argue it can ‘get inside of you’ like no news article can.
The above is an example of how poetry can touch you in a variety of ways and allow you various interpretations. It’s from Ginsberg’s poem Europe! Europe! He wrote this poem in Paris in 1958. Probably best known for his poem Howl, click here to hear himself read it out loud, Ginsberg was a Jewish American poet and writer who vigorously used his writing to express the deepest emotions, including to protest. Poetry has the ability to do that, differently than a story can, I believe. Seems, to me, that through its ability to deal with complexity in the way it plays with language it is able to tell that different narrative.
Using lyrical language, for example, means it can address the toughest of things that we deal with as human beings: death, war, disasters, etc.
This beautiful article ‘A thousand yarns and snapshots - why poetry matters during a pandemic’ describes the richness of poetry in very fine ways. It makes the case that ‘in times of a (national) pandemic, poetry’s role and its duties may come to seem all the more important: all the more civil and politically sane. The poem - even in the case when it is quite a short lyric, even if comic - carries the message of moral responsibility in its saddle bag.’
For many people reading a poem is quite different to reading a novel. Could it be that a poem is more like a song or a painting? We can return again and again and take different meanings and/or experience from it. Very few novels are like that. Could that be the reason that any people do not ‘go for’ poetry? I know that for a long time I could not ‘do poetry’, for precisely that reason. Once I was done with a story, I wanted to leave it behind me. Nowadays, however, I will return to a poem again and again, and see what I take away from it this time. Particularly those dealing with the difficult subjects of life. It’s an invitation to me to ponder. Would you be more likely to read a poem, if you approach it like a song or a painting?
As is quite nicely put by Bridget Minamore on ‘OBV - Operation Black Vote’: ‘The power of poetry makes it a real force to be reckoned with. Poetry can affect all generations, and make people consider anything from love to loss.... And if done well it can illuminate parts of life to the reader that had never been considered. And spoken word is no different, it is performance poetry that is rapidly growing in popularity. One of its most appealing qualities is that it can be performed in many ways varying from a soliloquy to rap.’
‘it's evident that I'm irrelevant to society
That's what you're tellin' me, penitentiary would only hire me
Curse me 'til I'm dead, church me with your fake prophesizing
That I'ma be just another slave in my head’
Sings Kendrick Lamar in The Blacker The Berry, touching people across a nation, across the world, at festivals where people gather from all walks of life.
‘You hate me don't you?
I know you hate me just as much as you hate yourself
Jealous of my wisdom and cards I dealt’
How words can move us, inviting us to linger in another world, to wonder.
Ezra Pound suggests that the legacy we inherited from Ginsberg through his mother’s story in Kaddish was that ‘only emotion endures’. What invitation to pick up that poem!
Happy reading, happy weekend. Stay safe, stay sane, use poetry :)