Work is very busy for us all these days, but we’re pulling through. Annie takes the moment to plug our episode on careers for people with a BA in English since Kali is stressed out at work.
What’s the Point of Poetry? (01:43)
This is Kali’s favorite topic, and one of Annie’s least favorite. So this is going to be a fun one. Kali’s going to be doing most of the talking trying to convince Annie that poetry’s good.
Annie can tell you when disliking poetry crystallized for her, even. There a moment, and in fact, there was an event...
Annie was a do-gooder in undergrad. I'm sure you can imagine she was very active in her English department. We know, this is all surprise for everyone.
One day, she volunteered to help sit at the table and take tickets for a spoken-word poetry event. For those who don’t know what spoken-word is, it’s basically when your friend thinks he's a rapper, but isn’t. (Annie’s words, sorry. Basically, it’s poetry meant to be spoken aloud and without necessarily rhyming.)
So, she was sitting there watching these people do their spoken-word poetry, with very, very long sentences with very little rhythm, talking for like four hours.
So there's a reception afterward, and Annie took tickets because there were separate tickets for the reception, too. And as she was sitting there, she wrote a poem about how much she hated poetry. (No, she doesn’t have it anymore, she wishes she did!)
Eventually, a man walked up and commiserated with her – handing her a glass of red wine and walking off.
Kali’s pretty sure that’s par for the course.
But she thinks Annie didn’t find her genre. And that’s alright.
So let’s get into it.
Why do we love poetry or why should we love poetry?
Well, OK, you don't have to love poetry, but you should appreciate the fact that poetry exists. That’s because for the longest time, we didn't have recorded language. We had oral traditions – in general, oral storytelling (which was not all poetry).
Oral poetry is words or story communication you're attempting to convey that relies on a meter of some sort. In fact, the oldest form of recorded storytelling – Beowulf, something we have fragments of – is poetry. And the same thing with Homeric epics.
Poetry in general because of its rhythm, rhyme, meter, it is much easier to remember in a lengthy form.
And even after we had the written language, it's not like it was widespread up until the 1600s or 1700s. It was all handwritten, illuminated texts. It's not like the printing press was around for a lot of human history. It's been around for a thumbnail amount of time as far as our history goes.
Anyway so, the fact that you have a rhyme, the fact that you have a meter, and you can learn a set of rules that can apply to a huge body of works – that helps you as somebody that takes information and take it places and keep it with you and keep it in roughly the same form.
There's knowledge that's been handed down in Aboriginal tribes for centuries, almost word for word, because of these traditions.
There are different types of oral traditions for sure. It's just that the lengthier you get, it's much harder to bring with you and to remember correctly when it doesn’t rhyme or anything. So these poetic traditions are that much more likely to have been remembered.
It is just easier. And we're lazy people – we're efficient people.
And if you’re a traveling minstrel, bard, or knowledge bringer – which was a very important job back in the day – you had to be able to physically remember all of this.
Even if they could, they wouldn’t have carried around a bunch of books. It's not like they had a wheely suitcase. (But imagine in your next D&D campaign if the bard got to carry around a wheely suitcase? How adorable would that be?)
No, they had to be able to leave quickly. They could be pursued by bad people, bandits, wildlife, the weather...
Again, only recently has the world become safer for us as a people. For the most part, everything has always tried to kill us.
But just generally speaking: You have to build on the foundations of what has come before, and if you don't know what has come before, it's so much harder to grow and to establish a tradition that you can build off of.
And so, even if you don't necessarily appreciate poetry – though Kali would argue that a specific genre that has burned you shouldn't necessarily turn you off of every form of poetry – you should still appreciate the historic impact that it has had on the evolution of our species.
Ultimately, Annie can appreciate that without Homer’s epics we would not have much of the literature that we have today. And we wouldn't have Homer's epics at all if it weren't for the simple act of poetry.
And major figures in the literary world have copied the Homeric tradition, as well as the Norse Eddas, which were similar. And not just tradition, people have copied parts of the stories. Think of The Aeneid, which was written many years later in the tradition of the Homeric epics. (For those who slept through that day of English class, the Aeneid was the story of heroes going from Troy to Rome to establish a new state.)
You’ve also got Dante’s Inferno. Annie always forgets this story is in verse since it’s not really read that way in English, only in the original Italian.
On that note, Kali still considers works in translation to be poetry, even if they don’t rhyme or have the same meter as the original works. Inferno is still very poetic, especially if you've got a good translation. Its best translations do not try to mimic that because Italian it's got a lot more vowels and it just internally has a lot of internal rhyme. That’s something English and anything based off of a more Germanic language loses.
Speaking of Translators, Please Give Them Their Due (09:50)
Translators are actually having huge problems right now. They are not getting the credit, they're not getting any recognition, and they're not getting the money, either.
The person who wrote the book originally, yes, absolutely should be getting a lot of credit. But the truth is that if you have the ability to take one cultural set of references and translate it accurately to another, you should be given accolades. Translators deserve everything. It’s important, necessary, and critical.
What Made Kali Love Poetry (12:32)
Once upon a time, at a Scholastic book fair, Kali found a very thin volume of some of the most popular verses of Emily Dickinson, an American poet. Dickinson had come from a well-to-do family and had decided she wasn’t going to do what was expected. She shut herself in her room and wrote poetry. She lived her truth. Just as a general aside, she had to disguise who she was for a lot of her publishing career.
In Kali’s opinion, Dickinson is a very good bridge between classical metered poetry (which rhymes) and modern poetry (which doesn't have as much structure and doesn't have to rhyme).
And Kali is going to share some of her poetry with us today. It’s very short...
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
So, it's not all terrible bongos. (Reference alert: the stereotypical spoken-word poetry event typically has bongos. We know, ew.)
It's like with anything, there's bad writing and good writing, and you can be subjected to absolute garbage. But the really good stuff is the kind of thing that will transcend all that and help you crystallize a thought or a feeling. It can change your life.
Kali isn’t going to read too many, but there are two more that she wants to read here.
This next one is just a little more political. E.E. Cummings is one of Kali’s favorites as well. He writes absolutely bats*** poems. He's very playful with words, in the same vibe as Shakespeare – an avant-garde approach to the popular medium.
next to of course god america I
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?
He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water
E.E. Cummings was not a fan of war. This was written about WWI but in 1926.
Many of the poets, especially some of the most famous poets, were really f***** up by the Great War, which was the first real World War. A lot of them got called. They either had to serve, or they lost friends that served. Some of them were able to get out of it or they fled to Europe and dodged the draft in a variety of countries.
You can absolutely feel Cummings saying “f*** war.”
That's the thing that Kali loves about poetry. If you're being genuine as you approach it, and you're not trying to be cute or smart about it, it really does evoke emotions.
Because we’re all the same. For better and worse, we are the same creatures that we've always been. It's just that we are given at various times in history greater access to embrace certain parts of ourselves. In Kali’s opinion, right now, we just have more time to indulge and be more thoughtful and careful. And we don't have to be as jaded and sad and tired and ignore all of the bad things. Because, you know, we live, and we die and that's it.
We just have the time and the capacity and the luxury to be more considerate.
Annie thinks the fact that Cummings was writing that in 1926 and still had all of that feeling, it was that the world was not at war he was able to express those things. And he was able to tap into that feeling without having to be at war.
The last poem Kali will read is her favorite poem.
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
This is also E. E. Cummings.
It’s also evocative of love. Even Annie can see how we’ve all felt that.
Maybe to get into Annie’s psychology a little bit here, maybe one of her main issues is where people will say, “there are things that you simply can't do in prose,” or “there are things you simply can't do in other genres of writing.” One of those things is a rhythm or evoking sound. But in all honesty, the great prose writers CAN do that.
In Kali’s opinion, they’re evoking the poetic elements there.
But when we talk about poetry, the impacts of poetry, we're still talking about literature as a whole. When we're talking about oral traditions being remembered, yes you do usually need a rhyming scheme to remember.
But there are some other stories that hit you so hard that the words themselves don't matter and you can retell that story over and over again no matter what. The heart of that story is getting told. And the information is still moving.
But there are poetry evangelists out there who will say that anyone who doesn't like poetry is just too stupid to understand. There's a snootiness, Annie thinks, that comes with some poetry. And that, she thinks, is one of the main barriers that many people have.
Kali agrees that poetry (versus prose) has certainly had a difficult path getting to the masses.
When we did go forward with the printing press, they did print “literature.” But, poetry for a long time was seen as elevated and academic.
As with anything that's locked in the ivory tower for so long, that's now making its way out, there are very good grassroots movements and poetry. Amanda Gorman’s poems have been incredible, out on the world stage.
Good poets don’t think that poetry should be separate or kept from people. And it's not separate from literature. It's not separate from humanity. And it's not separate from the emotions that inspired it, in Kali's opinion.
Pretentious a******* have given poetry a bad rap. And they should f*** off. In fairness pretentious a******* are a problem wherever they are.
The way you play with grammar and rhythm and sound really says whether something has elements of poetry or not. But also, a lot of prose is poetic.
Kali Makes Us Cry (24:38)
But what about these new social media genres of poetry? Many of us have seen things like Tumblr poetry out there. How does Kali feel about those?
This is a particular poem that Kali found. She doesn’t know how well it will come across on audio. But here goes...
You're asexual? But...
"but sex is what makes us human!"
in 1916 a French officer in his twenties writes his
doctoral dissertation under
heavy mortar fire.
he sends it by mail, a page
at a time, to his wife.
a week before he’s to step up to the podium and
defend his work rather than hiscountry
he is killed in action.
even as the bullets rip
through him he still wishes he could have become a professor
in French literature and
the university awards him a posthumous Ph.D.
sex is
a woman breaks down in tears on the phone because
a week is not enough time to
get over a breakup.
her sister drives an hour across town,
comes up the front steps with
a gallon of ice cream and somebeer
and together they eat moose tracks and marathon
every
single
Godzilla movie
ever made.
sex is
she’s late for work but her car isn’t
starting and even through her coat and hat she’s cold.
she knows she can’t be late again because she’s missed
one time too many already because her
father’s nurse was sick with the flu and someone
needed to help him bathe.
the clock ticks past fifteen after and she hits
the wheel like it’s a heavy bag as though that will help
steps on the gas like the car will go
and wonders how she will pay rent
and how she will feed her father.
sex is
it takes three people to hold the predator down because
even with the cover over his head
a bleeding eye and shattered wing
he is trying to hurt them.
none of them have seen this bird before in their lives but
they bandage his wing and head and give him a painkiller and
put him in a warm place to sleep and heal because
it is right.
at first he is paralyzed and cannot
fly but soon he is taking steps
and then fluttering, and then soaring, and
six months later he is whole and healed and hunting.
once he is gone they never see him again
which means they’ve done their jobs right.
sex is
in 1969 a girl watches grey-and-white footage on her parents’ tinytelevision and
can’t quite believe that what she is seeing is not a movie set but
another planet.
the men on the screen look a little like
aliens with bulbous heads and no faces and fat
marshmallow arms
but they are still men.
her mother puffs on a cigarette behind her and declares that
this is progress
even if it was just a small step.
the girl grows up to be not an astronaut but a secretary
and her boss calls her ‘sweetheart’.
but sex is
a boy is taught that real men don’t cry so
he doesn’t.
when his best friend dies from a self-inflicted
gunshot wound, he locks himself
in the shower every day and sobs under scalding
water until it runs cold
so nobody will see him grieving
so nobody will see that tears are just love that
has no place left to go.
he learns to dull love rather than suppress its expression and
soon the owner of the liquor store knows him by name.
three DUIs, two evictions, and twelve steps later,
he is feeding people at a homeless shelter,
and telling them it’s all right to cry.
Sex is
the broken man tells the comedian
that he didn’t mean to step in front of the car but the rain
made it hard to see.
he seems okay but his leg
does not.
the comedian clutches a grubby receipt with the driver’s
plate number scrawled on the back
in pink pen, stands out in the rain so the broken man
can have his umbrella,
and gives him the comedy routine that ruined his career
so the man doesn’t think about the pain in his leg.
once he’s out of the hospital, the fixed man sends him a thank-you card
with kittens on it.
what makes us human
yawning is contagious,
and there is a species of bird whose young we call “pufflings”.
melodic collections of sound, spaced by silence,
can move us to tears.
the tallest building in the world is
two-thousand seven-hundred and seventeen feet tall.
in less than eighty years we went from our first powered flight
to touching the moon,
and in one-hundred from the first phone call
to instantaneous connection between thinking machines of our owncreation.
we make pies out of tree organs
and let cow’s milk ferment until it hardens and then
we put them together, because apple pie with cheddar cheese is delicious.
what makes us human is
the earliest fossils of anatomically modern humans are
two-hundred thousand years old .
we have had pet dogs
for sixteen-thousand of those years, longer
than corn
or the wheel.
the steps we take are part of
one of the most energy-efficient gaits the
animal kingdom has ever seen.
we invented the concepts of love
and hate
and justice, and mercy
and we invented the language to convey them.
we sharpened rocks, then metal, to convince other people
who don’t hold the same idea of those things as we do
because we think
it’s right.
we are two hundred millennia of love and disappointment and
sorrow and innovation and
mercy and kindness and dreams
and failure
and recovery.
but sex is what makes us human.
If you’d like to hear more of Kali’s favorite poems or if you’d like to hear some recommendations, you can email us at InkSinkPodcast@gmail.com.
She is happy to recommend And Her Soul Out of Nothing, a great book of modern poetry and feminist writing. Here, Bullet is another great book of modern verse (this one was written by a soldier from the second Gulf War).
But also if anyone has any recommendations, please email us!