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I was bound to get around to the subject of poetry sooner or later. I
started off this website with “The Ballad of Dutch Schultz”, a production from my
drug enforcement days which described what it’s like to practice that trade
against obstacles. I have others I’m saving for future editions.
For most people today poetry is a subject that doesn’t trouble them very much
and is pretty far off their radar screen. The reasons are not obscure, which
is not something that can be said about the poetry that gets into print in
the media. Most of it is baffling, to the point where it doesn’t challenge the
reader to dig into it to find its meaning, but simply incites him to turn his
back on it and find some other way to spend his time. The poets want it this
way, because to be intelligible is to surrender to the Muggles and descend to
their level of ignorance.
In spite of this, there’s still a lot of poetry being carried on, probably
more than ever in history. Where? On Tin Pan Alley, Motown, MTV and a lot of
other such locations, is where. Every song is after all, a poem, and thousands
of songs are being written. By the law of averages, some of these poems have
got to be worth consideration. I even see some of them reprinted in poetry
anthologies, meaning that someone else thinks so too.
I’m not qualified to judge the quality because my familiarity with song
lyrics stopped with Cole Porter. I’m a stranger to pop music after that. The
reprinted stuff I’ve mentioned wasn’t that impressive, but neither was ninety
percent of the other material in the anthologies. This is well within normal
limits.
Even rap music isn’t something that’s completely outside the boundaries of
literature. It may be obscene, or even barbaric, but one thing is sure, its
practitioners care about language. They work with rhyme and meter, rhythm,
cadence and all the rest of the ingredients of poetry and who knows? may even
produce some before they’re through.
I got to reflecting on the whole subject through the instrumentality of a
politician named Suozzi who got himself in trouble out here on Long Island. When
that happens, and you have a name like his, it’s reflexive for a verbal type
like myself to think about how well one of the poems written about Fuzzy-Wuzzy
could be adapted to a new use. It adapted very well, even if only a limerick
resulted.
Limericks are something I can still do. They are short enough. Anything
lengthy comes with a lot more effort than it did when I wrote my first verse in
1969, inspired by Ted Kennedy’s debacle at Chappaquiddick. There was an
outburst of barroom ballads at the time and I got caught up in the wave.
After that I wrote more and I read more. I’m still reading poetry. I have a
collection of books which have taught me a lot about how it should be done,
how it’s being done, and how it used to be done.
This last is very well illustrated by a recent acquisition, a big anthology
published in 1876, edited by William Cullen Bryant. Bryant was a very upright
gentleman who was editor of the New York Post for forty years, long before it
discovered headless bodies in topless bars. I’m afraid I used to think of him
as one of the Seven Deadly Poets in my school curriculum. They all had three
names, they came from New England, and they had a Serious Message for Young
People.
They openly admitted this. “Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is
not its goal” and you’d better remember that, young fella, was the word given
out by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, their ringleader. Pretty square, we
thought, and yet, they could write, and some of their stuff was good and even funny
sometimes. Re-reading them a bit, as I’ve been doing, confirms that opinion.
The first thing you learn about Nineteenth-Century writers, who dominate the
book, is that they all had a fine flow of language and could dash off fifty or
a hundred verses without drawing a deep breath. Their rhythm, their meter,
and their rhyme patterns were perfection of their kind. In other words, they
were readable, even though the retreat from poetry to prose that’s been going
on for well over a century now leaves the average reader without the kind of
patience that it takes to ingest poetry the way people did in 1876.
Then there’s the problem of Outlook. If you think poetry from those days is
likely to have been serious, religious, patriotic, moralistic, sentimental,
genteel, euphemistic, and other such things, you are right. The whole world
being a lot more cynical now, this doesn’t go down. The news is that it didn’t
always go down then either. One of the conventions of those days, for
instance, was the glorification of the past. Writers invested it with unearthly
glamour and found that the present contrasted poorly with it. They liked to
write about the good old days of wooden ships and iron men when knights were bold
and ladies fair. Somehow, though, a lady named Frances Brown was one of
those who didn’t quite get the message. She did write a thing called “O The
Pleasant Days of Old”, but it read like this:
O the pleasant days of old, which so often people praise!
True, they wanted all the luxuries that grace our modern days;
Bare floors were strewn with rushes, the walls let in the cold;
O, how they must have shivered in those pleasant days of old!
She went on to dismember the Middle Ages. Not everyone was a conformist in
her day.
Poetry is where you find it, as I demonstrate by this excerpt from O Holy
Cow, a little book containing the unconscious poetry created by Phil Rizzuto
broadcasting Yankee games in the 90’s. Some characters decided that when Phil
began free associating, sliding from subject to subject, without letting the
game interfere, he was speaking in blank verse which they kindly transcribed and
committed to print, like this:
“Remember that fellow I told you/Champ Marble?/Champ Marble/He’s a hundred
and two years old/When he was a hundred years old I told you/Last year he was a
hundred and one/This year he’s a hundred and two/Played golf with him over at
Upper Montclair Country Club/He’s probably in bed now/A little low/One ball,
two strikes/His name is Champ Marble/James F. Marble, to be exact/I mean
really a tremendous man/He doesn’t wear glasses/No hearing aid/ Sees better than
me/Hits better than me/High and tight/Two and two”.
Poets are born, not made
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