Angelou, Wordsworth, and cultivating a poetic community
Last weekend, I shared with the members of our poetry salon that I was reading with pleasure Howard Axelrod’s book Stars in our Pockets: Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age. Axelrod writes with a poet’s eye on the largely negative impacts of social media on attention, sense of time and space, and identity. Just today, I read a passage in Axelrod’s book that shed some further light on our salon conversation about William Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World is Too Much With Us.”
Here’s what Axelrod says:
Shakespeare and the sonnet. Dante and terza rima. Basho and the haiku. These poets didn’t just manage within the constraints of these forms; the constraints loosed them into unlikely discoveries, acting as an impediment to certain creative impulses while forcing the development of others, just as a block to one of the senses makes the others more acute. The form wasn’t a cookie cutter, imposing its little star-order on their poems from the outside, but a unit internalized by the poet as a king of organic form, into which his mind could push and open into greater complexity than if the form hadn’t existed. Creativity for these poets wasn’t thinking “outside the box” but using the shape of the box to find truth through it, and letting those truths proliferate in box after box to find truth through it, and letting those truths proliferate in box after box until something new, both constrained and unconstrained, appeared.
Here’s Wordsworth’s sonnet, with boldly original turns of phrase (in boldface) that we attributed to Wordsworth’s using the shape of the box to find truth:
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
You are likely to identify different phrases then we did, but certainly Wordsworth’s sonnet illustrates Axelrod’s point handsomely.
As for Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise, our salon felt the lack of Angelou’s voice with its accumulated life experience. Here to fill in that gap is Angelou herself. If you know the poem, you will note the difference between the text and what Angelou offers us here. Those differences highlight the creativity of poetry in performance, where even the actual poet has the poetic licence to play with the text:
In the case of both Wordsworth and Angelou, spending time with their poetry excited our curiosity about their lives. I’ll report back on ways to further get to know Wordsworth, but for now, I’ll leave you with a link to a full-length Angelou documentary which we briefly discussed at the salon:
Watch and decide for yourself how well Angelou earns her sassiness, haughtiness, and sexiness.
Finally, at the salon, I raved about a recent performance at the Old South Church in Boston by Ethan Koss-Smith of his song cycle of fourteen poems by Robinson Jeffers. In response to a question, I struggled to put into words the manner in which Ethan set Jeffers’ text. Here, to make my point far better than I could myself, is a link to Ethan’s Substack post, where he embeds his recording of Jeffers’ “Vulture:”
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