Sympathy, celebration for the poet | Philadelphia Inquirer | 2011-08-07
A Guide to Modern Poetry
By David Orr
HarperCollins. 224 pp. $20.99.
Reviewed By Helen W. Mallon If reading a guidebook to contemporary poetry appeals to you about as much as diving into a history of space heaters in this triple-digit summer, David Orr, poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, knows how to turn on the AC.In Beautiful & Pointless , Orr admits that books on poetry tend to read like math texts. Either that, he says, or they are rapturous "testimonials announcing poetry's ability to derange the senses" and make us "dance naked under the full moon, and so forth."
Orr is no highbrow who expects readers to know the difference between a villanelle and Valpolicella before he'll pop a beer with them. If anything, he arouses reader sympathy for the poor poet, whose visions will never be optioned by Hollywood, and whose main audience will ever be limited to other poets. Even though Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in what amounted to an 1821 version of a self-help pamphlet that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," the political engagement of poets is in a "potentially awkward position relative to the larger political world, which is generally not paying much attention." (At least not in this country. Shelley might have been heartened to know that in Soviet Russia, China, and Burma, poets would be hounded like domestic terrorists.)
This leaves the contemporary American poet laboring beneath the twin burdens of irrelevance and Greatness. In fact, Orr dedicates an entire chapter to ambition because "it's especially difficult to talk about the situation of poetry" - is it healthy? endangered? postmortem? - "when the people talking about it appear to agree on little, except possibly that a poem should begin with words."
Instead, he approaches "what it means to write a poem" slantwise, "by talking about a related concept. . . . Not about what poetry is, but about what we want it to be." This touches on what Philadelphia poet Daisy Fried calls "capital-G Greatness," and opens up a discussion of style. A style approved as ambitious, Orr says, is "less likely to involve words like 'canary' and 'sniffle' and 'widget' and more likely to involve words like 'nation' and 'soul' and 'language.' " Our assumptions, he writes, "work like a velvet rope: If a poet looks the way we think a great poet ought to, we let him or her into the club quickly - and sometimes later wish we hadn't.
Death Poem Sympathy - News
"when the people talking about it appear to agree on little, except possibly that a poem should begin with words." Instead, he approaches "what it means to write a poem" slantwise, "by talking about a related concept. . . . Not about what poetry is,
Bereavement messages are usually short, simple writings used to convey sympathy regarding a death. Baker describes her messages not as poems, but as short essays. "I use quotes from the Bible, literature, books and articles, and relate them to
Ironically, he quoted the closing lines of an old poem Bruce and the Spider to bolster his hope that despite numerous setbacks, we may yet achieve the unity we so love to declare: "That Perseverance gains its meed,/And Patience wins the race.
Lastly, the tone of the poem helps readers develop a sympathetic attitude to the author's sadness and despair. The ways in which the author refrains from judgment and blame develops sympathy towards the author's experience.
North of Boston includes "Mending Wall", "The Death of the Hired Man", "Home Burial" and "After Apple Picking", among the most durable and widely read poems of the 20th century. What Thomas undertook for Frost and, by inadvertent prophecy for himself,
Poems about Death Help Start the Healing Process | WidowsHood
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Death Poem Sympathy - Bookshelf
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