What Use is Poetry? Featured Book – Tracings by Carolyn Howard-Johnson
In the Red Engine Press January 2006 e-newsletter, “Yarnspinners and Wordweavers,” Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of Tracings, writes:
Auden’s idea of the reason for poetry is to disenchant. That, my reader, can be why I am now not a fan of rhyme or pretty, even though I like food pictures, particularly chocolates. I prefer melancholy, reflective, and if the music is sung, let it discord to hold the reader alert, make him reconsider. Nursery rhymes are for nurseries, sunsets to be viewed firsthand from a bluff, preferably even as preserving palms with someone handsome. The tendons of the quality poetry are politics, introspection, and the abominable snowmen amongst us tempered–on occasion–with the aid of a glance back at where we have been. Oh, and irony. That’s better than tiramisu and latté for preserving humans speak to me past due into the nighttime.”
In the preface to One Hundred and One Famous Poems, published in 1929, editor Roy W. Cook talks about the excellent need for poetry in the advanced commercial age.
While the advanced age, with podcasting and blogs, has made poetry more accessible, poetry is also considered frivolous–and truly not profitable. It’s a disgrace because Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s poetry could cause an air raid to sound still and calm. She can let us stand beside an uncle who smells of Barbasol and is on his way to battle. The diffused message is clear: Stop. Pay attention. Listen.
Most people wrote poetry in excessive college that protected protests towards dad and mom, petitions to teenage crushes, or the standard “my lifestyle stinks, what’s the meaning of all of it” poems. As adults, we may also dribble our wine-and-cappuccino-soaked angst onto the page. As a personal remedy, poetry cannot be beaten, and it helped poet Dessa Byrd Reed heal after an automobile accident. But Reed grew to become her healing writings right into a passion for poetry that took her to China currently.
Poetry is applicable in the contemporary textual content-messaging high-tech world, as evidenced by the use of all of the poetry websites. It speaks of affection, as in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets. It relates eternal epic truths, as in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It captures the cry of technology, as in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” It reflects, as in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It makes a cinematic statement about freedom behind bars, as in the film “Slam.” It speaks of the Divine, as within the poetry of Thich Nhat Hanh. I consider Carolyn Howard-Johnson that poetry moves us–or it ought to if we want to move others. Howard-Johnson’s poetry moved Compulsive Reader editor Magdalena Ball to name Tracings to The Compulsive Reader list of “Top Ten Reads of 2005.”
Howard-Johnson pokes fun at graphics of poets in poetry magazines; however surely loves poetry:
“So long before you took up a pen, wrote photos,
You imagined them in liquid blue, the tales of others,
You’re personal.”
It’s easy to get stuck in our memories without knowing them. Howard-Johnson peppers her poetry with images of the journey, not simply worldwide but a time tour. She remarks in “Poetry, Quantum Mechanics and Other Trifles” that her critique institution warns her she complicates her poems with too many layers:
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke talked about the truths of existence in Sonnets to Orpheus, showing us that a young ballet dancer, dead, is not always long gone but isn’t seen by us. That’s “the truth of this kind of grand/dessert.” That’s what poetry is about–revealing, evoking, describing, thought-frightening. Poetry connects the past with the present and destiny. Howard-Johnson can visit the ancient conflict museum in Oslo and reflect on the battle as it affected the arena:
“Norway’s fjords shed salty droplets
on faces like my father’s. Round faces. Eyes dilute-blue
just like the dull skies above them. Men who fought
Howard-Johnson considers war as it now impacts her own family:
“Only days before
I reached this spur, and I saw my grandson off to warfare by myself.
A sacrifice. An alternative. For my father, who never marched.”
We feel the sense of area in poetry. However, the place is fluid, as in Howard-Johnson’s paintings–a flight from LAX to Salt Lake City can take her through her youth, in which her mother washed a slip every night. The unities of time and location in good drama or a brief story can be tweaked in poetry–even though often the poet, like a painter, wants to listen to interest in one time, one area, one concept. Good poetry can tell a story or seize a temper either way.
Dr. James Ragan, the director of the University of Southern California Master of Professional Writing Program, where I graduated in 1999, says in an interview quoted on the Master of Professional Writing Web page:
“You want to task yourself. Ask yourself, is my time here going to have the meaning I need for it to have? Poetry has given me what that means. But then I had to write on the extent that allowed me to move borders as well as time, and that is the task of the introduction.”
Ragan, like Howard-Johnson, strives for common issues. The non-public and the usual aren’t mutually exclusive. A poem may be peppered with non-public information; however, it may additionally capture a commonplace history (World War II), the need for tolerance (a favorite subject matter in Howard-Johnson’s work), growing old, the worry that a poet has started too late in existence, which Howard-Johnson captures in “A Reel Left Running”:
“Now age obscures pics, pulled taffy,
whisked meringue, they melt, warfare to be named.
So plenty there is to say, your craft left idle for years,
equipment lay fallow, and now, there’s so little time.”
It is no longer the output that matters with poetry–many college-age poets and their older colleagues produce reams upon reams of equal poems on every occasion. William Wordsworth’s poems are in no way identical from poem to poem; Ginsberg went through poetic levels; Arlo Guthrie produced “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre,” “This Land Is Your Land,” and the post-Katrina oft-performed anthem “City of New Orleans.” Emily Dickinson’s poems have a commonplace style. However, they are all unique. While not unusual issues and pics (together with cooking and cakes, as she points out) thread themselves through Howard-Johnson’s chapbook, her poems do not provide you with the experience that you hear the same old again and again.
Dessa Byrd Reed said it best during a writers’ night at Barnes and Noble in Palm Desert: “Poetry is the language of marvel.” The surprise in this contemporary international is that our language, with its profanities, “That’s warm” catchphrases, e-mail shorthand (no longer inspired by way of E.E. Cummings) that stimulated the book Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, makes room still for poetry and beauty.
Does this suggest a poem has to be deep and weighty to be meaningful or lovely? You may additionally have listened to pompous, ponderous poems on The Meaning Of It All. Wolf Knight, a poet from Ann Arbor, Michigan, poked fun at dusty professors whose books sit unread in university libraries. While the traditional poems may demand more of our time and attention, they make for less complicated studying than a twenty-page musing on the meaning of a fly on the wall (though a fellow poet and then-med pupil at the University of Michigan did produce a high-quality poem about a fly). Howard-Johnson’s poetry is significant and pleasant to study…No longer best that it makes us suppose, as she says, about who we have been and where we are going. Poetry is more excellent by using small information, but poetry itself is enormous.
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