Two Poems

Here are two contemporary poems, each glorious in its own way:

The Doyle poem is lovely, evocative and stirring. It might be about heroin addiction, or it might not. It could be about dreaming, or self-delusion. It’s probably best not to try to pin it down, but to accept that what it means is what it says, and just experience it. And there’s the paradox: the very fact that it can’t be pinned down makes it more effective in pinpointing a feeling, something elusive and shadowy inside us.

Roby’s speaker, on the other hand, comes right out and says he’s “romancing the dope.” He doesn’t glamorize it. We get ashtrays, sweat in the pits of elbows, the taste of a doctor’s office at the back of your throat. The poem is firmly rooted in the here and now, but it’s not limited by that; it moves from the mundane to the transcendent. It unfolds from the earth—this earth—and sprouts spikenard and exotic flowering tobacco.

What it does is difficult, so why try? Why not dispense with the mundane altogether? Get rid of the references to newspapers and doctors’ offices and keep the Dalai Lama. Then you might still have a good poem, but it wouldn’t take us from one place to another. It wouldn’t transport us. It’s the difference between a blooming flower and a flower, blooming.

I’m blathering about this partly in response to John Whitworth’s essay, “Beauty in Poetry,” which is still bugging me. I like what he defends, but I also like a lot of poetry he thinks I shouldn’t. Like Judy Grahn’s “A woman among motorcycles” or Matthew Dickman’s “Ghost Story”. Or a poem I once saw in draft form, in a workshop, about a girl who ran away from home and had dirty underwear. I’ve written several poems about a girl who ran away from home. They all use sea creatures as metaphors. Not one mentions dirty underwear. And yet, if you’ve ever run away from home, you know that dirty underwear is a major, inescapable reality. That ugly detail made the girl in the poem more real to me. It helped me empathize with her.

Empathy is beautiful.

Some beauty lovers aren’t content to enjoy beautiful poems about beautiful things; they want to do away with everything ugly. There’s something inhuman about their vision of poetry, something almost Naziesque. Any poetic vision that would exclude Dulce Et Decorum Est is a bad one. Repellent. Ugly.

I’ll let Czeslaw Milosz finish for me.

“Normalization”