Falling in Love with Poetry

Pondering my reluctance to engage with this essay, I suddenly realized what was holding me back. It was the title I had been assigned. Why? Because “Falling in Love” doesn’t describe my relationship with poetry very accurately. After seventy-two years of living—at least seventy of them with some kind of awareness of the art—our relationship doesn’t embody the sudden madness of infatuation but instead a dogged, occasionally rueful, commitment. It feels a lot like a long marriage with its ups and downs; its periods of resentment, withdrawal, and silence; its moments of renewal and genuine passion; its shared jokes and pleasures; its reliable consolations.

Attaining this status has not been a linear progression from lust to companionship, eros to agape, but instead a constant ebb and flow of attention and desire. Eros has been a familiar term for love since the time of Plato, whose Symposium explores the topic. The Greek word denotes sexual passion as opposed to affection or empathy and is personified by the mischievous god of that name whose arrows find their mark in the breast of a susceptible person. But extemporizing at the banquet that provides the context for their discussion, Plato’s speakers, Socrates in particular, argue that the power of eros transcends bodily desire: that contemplation of one’s beloved can provide a spiritual ladder to a higher knowledge of both truth and beauty.

Unfortunately, all this grand eloquence is interrupted by the playwright Aristophanes, overcome not by beauty but by a fit of hiccups. He tries to stop it by holding his breath, then by gargling with water, finally by tickling his nose with a feather, which induces an even more violent fit of sneezing. Plato isn’t given enough credit for how funny this is; even in the fourth century before the common era, philosophers were apt to make fools of themselves trying to explain the power of love.

These ostensible sages are clearly not the same ones Elvis Presley sings about some 2,330 years later when he claims that “Wise men say only fools rush in / But I can’t help falling in love with you.”

In my case, the irresistible “falling” came many years after my introduction to, and tentative practice of, poetry. I was seduced by the playfulness of language from the moment I first heard nursery rhymes, though I have no distinct memory of when that was. It was definitely before I could read or write, but once I had attained a rudimentary mastery of those skills, I spent a lot of time composing my own poems and making illustrated “books” with a three-hole-punch and a ribbon. This might suggest that I had a sense of vocation at an early age but really, there was nothing sacrosanct about it. I wasn’t “in love.” Poetry was just fun because it meant chanting stuff like

• Hickory dickory dock
• The mouse ran up the clock
• The clock struck one
• The mouse ran down
• Hickory dickory dock.

As soon as I typed this refrain, I felt compelled to research it online and was delighted to learn that it is thought to have originally been 1) a counting-out rhyme for a game like rock, paper, scissors, and 2) based on Cumbric numbers retained from a Celtic language that went extinct in the 12th century, as well as 3) referring to the astronomical clock at Exeter Cathedral, the case of which includes a small door through which cats can pursue mice. In other words, like many of the rhymes attributed to “Mother Goose,” this one has a rich historical context. But when I first heard it, it was simply memorable and entertaining. Of course I loved the image of a wee mouse running up and down a clock—as who wouldn’t?—but also the nonsensical but rhythmically and sonically pleasing refrain.

Language often seemed funny when I was little, and what drew me to poetry at first continues to entrance me: the way that sounds and rhythms provide meanings beyond the strictly denotative content of words. Meanings that your body apprehends rather than your mind. I love language with verve and reverberations. I love assonance and consonance, rhyme and repetition. I particularly cherish words that sound like what they describe (onomatopoeia) and words that contain their own opposites (contranyms) and am a sucker for a good (i.e. bad) pun. I’m fascinated by words in other languages that have no counterparts in English, and vice versa. I enjoy playing Scrabble and Boggle and doing cryptic crosswords. I even read Roget’s Thesaurus just for pleasure.

I have always been drunk on language, as all poets are.

My doting mother saved some of my juvenile “books” for posterity; I believe they are languishing in a dusty box somewhere in my house, having survived multiple purges of surplus paper. I really should consign them to a funeral pyre since they are nothing special, mostly anodyne ditties about the seasons or Beatrix-Potter-like anthropomorphic critters. I vaguely remember a tribute to a pickle; perhaps that one deserves to be preserved (sorry, not sorry).

But then something different happened. One day I wrote a poem that came from a secret place of inspiration. It was wiser than I was and unexpectedly moving. I was probably only ten years old when it came from wherever it came from, but still remember it vividly:

• Ashes to ashes
• Dust to dust
• But the Man of Steel
• Will only rust.

The possibility of writing something that surprised you, of discovering that you knew more than you thought you knew and that your words resonated beyond the particulars of the poem: this was new. I was shocked by my recognition that immortality— something all the fairy tales suggested you ought to wish for—could be a tainted gift. That you could be cursed to watch everyone you knew and loved die, and then be stuck living on alone, forever. Even better was the suggestion of tears implied by Superman rusting! It was perfect, but perfectly unplanned. Rhyme and association led me there without any conscious thought on my part, and then they stepped back quietly to enjoy my reaction.

If I have to locate a moment in time when I “fell in love with poetry,” this was probably it. Because I knew immediately that I wanted more of this experience and recognized that to get there, I would have to keep writing poems.

The next encounter with poetry seared into my memory was reading “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in grade nine. I was as compelled as that hapless wedding guest to listen to the mariner’s ghastly tale until it reached its conclusion. I have never forgotten the lines that filled me with horror:

• Alone, alone, all, all alone,
• Alone on a wide wide sea!
• And never a saint took pity on
• My soul in agony.

I was still writing in closed forms just as Coleridge did, but despite archaic diction and the occasional syntactical distortion to accommodate a forced rhyme, his tale proved that poetry could be a medium for talking about anything and everything. It could take you on a long journey and keep you rivetted from beginning to end.

Then the following year something even more important happened. We had a book fair at my school and impulsively I purchased a copy of Leonard Cohen’s second volume of poetry, The Spice Box of Earth. I was familiar with him as a musician and had learned to play “Suzanne” and “The Sisters of Mercy” badly on the guitar but had never read any of his poems. Well, the top of my head blew off! Here was someone from Montreal, like me (my Grandma Dorothy knew his mother; my father’s cousin Sandy had gone to high school with him); someone who was a living poet (probably the first such I had ever read); someone using everyday language to address the world we both inhabited.

And not every poem in his book rhymed; indeed, the very first one, which has remained a favourite, did not. This was so liberating.  Here’s its conclusion, comparing the vocation of poetry to that of a kiteflyer, which I still find thrilling:

• then you pray the whole cold night before,
• under the travelling cordless moon,
• to make you worthy and lyric and pure.

Those long “o”s resonating through “glory,” “so,” “whole,” “cold,” “before,” and “cordless” unify the stanza as deftly as rhyme could have done and revealed an alternative path to coherence in verse. More than that: the solemnity of that prayer captured my own yearning to become “worthy and lyric and pure”: that is, to merit the vocation that seemed to have chosen me. That yearning persisted for many years, though with time—and more experience of both poetry and poets—I became more realistic about both the worthiness and the purity.

But Adolescent Me was convinced that poetry was not only my calling but that it was a higher calling than any of the worldly professions proposed for my future. Having now surpassed the age at which most of my cohort have retired with fat pensions, and still being dependent upon poorly paid freelance editing and teaching, I ruefully acknowledge the wisdom of the career advice I refused to take. On the other hand, I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to devote my life to reading and writing (the reading part is absolutely essential, though insufficiently acknowledged when creativity is discussed). Most folks’ passions are relegated to being hobbies, or something to return to when they retire from more serious employment. Whereas I will never retire because I am doing what I love.

Also, I can’t afford to.

But here’s the thing: the fact that I love doing what I do doesn’t make it easy. It is still work. A lot of work! Sometimes a poem emerges fully formed the way that elegy for Superman did when I was a kid. On those rare occasions you can thank the muse, your lucky stars, or your subconscious mind for delivering poetry readymade and gift-wrapped. But most of the time you have to sweat it out, and cross it out, and rewrite it, even putting the malformed object away in a drawer for years until whatever was clumsy or fake or inexact in it suddenly resolves and all the sounds and rhythms, all the words and images, all the allusions and associations just click into place and the experience you were trying to create for others is there, on the page, complete.

“At Dawn, the Mist”—the poem that appeared in the previous issue of The New Quarterly—had a different genesis than either of those two extremes: the poem that arrives fully formed and the one reluctant to take shape. I thought about it for at least a year before starting to work on it. I knew it was going to be a long meditation inspired by seeing mist rise off a lake at dawn. I knew that each section was going to be in the same stanza form, though not what precise form that would be. I knew it would be quiet and full of imagery and about the consolations of the natural world. So when my brother offered me the use of his cottage in the Laurentians for two weeks, I knew I was finally going to write it there and then. And I did.

Or at least I got a first draft down on paper. I still kept working on it off and on for another eighteen months.

Perhaps half my poems evolve that way. An idea or image or phrase or rhythm or a spatial sense of incipient structure comes first, and I sit with it for a long time before I feel ready to tease out its implications. It accrues substance the way an oyster generates a pearl from a piece of grit—though sadly, not all such creations turn out to be precious. If you write a lot of poems you also trash a lot of poems. Thankfully, now that I write on the computer, I’m not wasting so much paper. My debt to trees is already insurmountable.

Given the myriad ways poetry has revealed itself to me and the multiple roles it has played in my life (I taught Creative Writing at many different institutions from 1982 until 2018 and have edited several poetry books), it seems a misrepresentation to say I “fell” in love with it rather than simply “I love it.” The “falling” part is both too sudden and too transitory for my long apprenticeship to the art.

Photo by Debby Hudson from Unsplash