Years of Days

I wrote in an earlier post that we must come to treasure our problems, and then seek to overcome them; it is the problems we choose that will make us great.

The poetry problem for me was that I rarely like poetry.  Yes, it's true.  Not that I am a snob, there are times I do like poetry.  And I certainly appreciate poetry.  But enjoying poetry and appreciating it are two different things.  I guess my taste in entertainment is more lowbrow, while my expectations for literature remain high.  So I always have hopes for some poetry that will entertain.  And why can't it be a movie or an exciting television series?  Why can't it make me cry or laugh or sit on the edge of my seat?

Even what is called good poetry is not often entertaining.  Most people share this feeling, and not many like poetry.  They must have excellent reasons not to like it.  Most poets like to blame the publishing industry, but it is the poets themselves, I believe, who can take the blame.  My first problem: I had to write something different than what I had seen.  If God may have actually called me to be a poet, it was because I am the guy who rarely likes poetry and poetry irritates me and because I would have to push myself in a new direction. 

Away from what is called good poetry by the literati, the professors and career writers who are defing what poetry ought to be.   We are told by  some of these at our universities (some of the only people who seem to read poetry now!) that it must be difficult, interesting, innovative, that poetry has to stretch the uses of language to the outer boundaries of previous usage.  Only a select few readers can derive entertainment from these characteristics: college students forced to read are the market.  It has become an exercise of the pure linguistic intelligence; musical, rhythmmic, kinestheticic intelligence no longer are integrated as in past generations, and aparently social intelligence, the sense of what real people might connect with, has blown away on the wind.

Why doesn't the average American pick up poetry?  It just isn't fun anymore.  I'd like to blame the industry, the publishers, but I can't.  People vote for what they want to read with their wallets, and the average Joe isn't buying.  They buy what is entertaining.  Entertainment, with humor and comedy, sometimes a bit of slapstick, is seen in poetry, but not often.  Something that brings tears, a story of suffering that exposes our true selves and leads to greater wisdom, tragedy, in the artistic sense, is not seen much anymore either.  I had to make something fun and not heavy, something light, with human voices celebrated musically, but nothing dense and over people's heads. 

And an EPIC?  Epic poetry... more problems.  Not just the size of the creation, nor the depth of the world needed to sustain a story, though these were certainly problems; there was the problem of committing years of your life to a work.  The problem of being fun had to be faced: epic poetry is so easy for readers to put down; one can read for a couple of minutes and then easily walk away.  Sure , we can read the Divine Comedy and appreciate it, Paradise Lost, Canterberry Tales, Don Juan, The Fairy Queen, The Golden Gate, but we can walk away.  Why can't we walk away from some novels?  Some stories we just can't put down!  The problem I have tried to solve: how to create an epic poem that is very hard to put down. 

So my focus over the years has gone away from heady insights and more into plot and voice set in strict lyrical forms, more focused on the tale than on other poetic elements. It is a story, and a series of stories.  I have become more interested in grabbing people by the hearts and not letting go than mounting a theological or philosophical soapbox, or painting pretty, insightful pictures.  I didn't want to paint pretty pictures or convey little parables, or show off my command of the language, or re-invent English, or, as many poets seem to want, to make poetry that is difficult and challenging.  There is nothing wrong with these aspirations.  This is what most poetry has become.  My struggle was to create something that roars load and long in a reader's mind, something that brings laughter with wit, and draws tears with its revelations and triumphs.

Epic Poetry has always fascinated me, and I have wondered why not many were trying it anymore.  The latter issue I figured out through years of practice.  It is tough to do.  To write any story is hard, but to set one to verse and create within it a real cosmos of meaning, fate and drama, with moments of laughter and pain that move it along, to make characters real for people, flawed and focused on the Lord, has required the work of years. 

It is sad that most poets seem to value the poem that comes like a lightening flash and desire instant acceptance and gratification for their precious child of an hour's work.  We have to polite: you don't tell people their children are ugly.  Everyone expects musicians to have practiced for years their craft, developed their rhythm and skill, before they will have anyone listen.  To become a concert pianist you have to sit for years at the keys before they even let you on the stage, and not many want to do that.  The motion of music, the mastery of signatures and styles and forms requires daily trial and error and failure and successes, until, after years of days, one plays and captivates hearers.  There are few willing to learn language and its music for years of days.  In poetry, there are few who spend the years of days.  That Dante took his whole life to write The Divine Comedy is inspirational for me: nothing is instant.  I see Dante in my mind's eye spending hours each day, writing, editing, perfecting, and doing this for 50 years.  Practice and patience: and people will be reading him a thousand years from now. 

But Melville spent the last part of his life on his epic poem.  Does anyone know it's name?  He was a great writer.  His poem, set in tetrameter, is a heroic and theological masterpiece with dark characters and an easy, rhythmic grace.  It has become a favorite of mine for his technical depth, his blending of the tight verse frame and a wide vision of the world and the interactions of people.  What is this epic's name?  Isn't this the problem he never solved: he wrote an epic he could love, and that those who wanted to work at it, to work at reading it, might also love.  He did not write something that people had to like, something they would be compelled to love. He wrote Clarel.  I love it.  People don't.

Another problem: you have to risk everything on an epic.  It will either work or not.  You give your whole self for your whole life to the work of love and building.  You pray that something beautiful and memorable will come from the years of days.  And it could fail completely.  But it is like marriage.  If it is going to work we have make it work every day and fill it with love and newness and life every day, and then something comes, and we see, after the years of days, a powerful and holy creation has come to life, has taken a life of its own separate from anything we imagined at the beginning.

I hope to finish something people read for a thousand years.