I am not a poetry buff. I haven't read very many poets. When considering poetry as an abstract whole, I feel vaguely unsettled. The memory of the very few poets I was made to read in school comes back, and I recall mostly unknown vocabulary and unknown sentiments. I have enjoyed Shakespeare and Donne. Rumi and Hafiz are more like spiritual friends than poets to me. I tend to read what falls into my lap, though my screening process is adept. The other day I was in the aisle looking for a book of some sort - now I couldn't tell you what it was. I saw a book of poetry by Melville... Really? He wrote poetry? If I'm forced to answer what my favorite book is, and the sun falls just right, I might tell you The Whale, but I didn't know he wrote poetry. Glancing through the book but not feeling that call, I looked further. My heart sunk inside somewhere: Walt Whitman. There's a poet with whom I am so little versed, yet always seemed discussed in school. The ubiquitous name Leaves of Grass comes to mind, along with a slight memory of lines and lines and lines. No rhyming. No sense. Oh god, my breath gets a little short. But naturally I have to listen to my little voice inside, and I had come across some of his lines recently elsewhere.
I check out the easiest looking book - a really big version of Song of Myself. Hell, the poem is only 44 pages, and I feel a little like I'm reading Jumanji as a kid, so it's ok. I remember my friend's advice to just read - forget all that analysis crap they taught in school. Just read. I can do that.
I just wrote out a line to tell how pleased I am with Mr. Whitman, but blasphemy and cursing probably show how little I've learned from the man. For a taste of the feeling, consider that the book was originally published with no authorship on the front, and only in the 24th page does he clue us in:
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly flesh and sensual.... eating drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist.... no stander above men and women or apart from them.... no more modest than immodest.
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Walt puts words, lots of them, to my sentiment that I am the biggest and the smallest of us. I have always felt it to be my due to be able to accomplish anything that anyone else has accomplished, and then more. And why not, I am a man just as they. Of course I've received laughs, cynicism, disbelief, and mostly just a quiet pressure (applied from the deep subconscious) to stop believing such things. So for whatever it's worth, Walt is beautifully filling my heart to the brim. Hey, maybe I can do this poetry stuff. I think the real issue - reading poetry - is having lived a certain extent, and then simply having the vocabulary and mental tenacity to sit down with a poem. When you can discipline yourself, I find that poetry is not some abstract, pedantic verbal expurgation. It is simply a man talking to another.
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My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.
Speech is the twin of my vision.... it is unequal to measure itself.
It provokes me forever,
It says sarcastically, Walt, you understand enough.... why don't you let it out then?
Come now I will not be tantalized.... you conceive too much of articulation.
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