I am a Poetry Junkie

By Mollie Fager, 3-01-06

I confess, if I don’t read poetry daily I get the shakes, drool from the mouth and slump listlessly in my office chair for lack of inspiration. It’s part of my lifestyle. I subscribe to on-line poetry websites and I can’t enter a bookstore without walking away with a poetry journal or a new poet’s work that I’ve just discovered. Last week poet and professor Greg Orr wrote an essay for the National Public Radio Series, This I Believe which is a part of the All Things Considered radio program www.npr.org . His essay was on why he writes poetry and believes in the art medium. Here is an excerpt:

"When I write a poem, I process experience. I take what's inside me -- the raw, chaotic material of feeling or memory -- and translate it into words and then shape those words into the rhythmical language we call a poem…..

Whenever I read a poem that moves me, I know I'm not alone in the world. I feel a connection to the person who wrote it, knowing that he or she has gone through something similar to what I've experienced, or felt something like what I have felt. And their poem gives me hope and courage, because I know that they survived, that their life force was strong enough to turn experience into words and shape it into meaning and then bring it toward me to share. The gift of their poem enters deeply into me and helps me live and believe in living."

Mr. Orr really captured poetry for me, both writing and reading it, in that essay. I can say it no better than he has. Here’s where it gets interesting. Why is poetry an acquired taste, like sushi? I’ve never met someone that sort of likes sushi. They either love it and get insatiable cravings that are only satisfied by a good California roll and some fatty Toro on rice, or else they cringe in revulsion and insist on anything BUT sushi when picking the restaurant to dine at. It’s the same with poetry. There are those that love it and those that don’t. And I just don’t get it. I mean—I think everyone likes a good short story or we all like books to read, whether you like fiction or non-fiction. Is poetry, as another literary form, that difficult or abstract that it must invoke such a black and white response?

When I’ve posed this question for others I often get responses such as, “I just don’t get it—what did it mean?�, “it’s too cornball and flowery� or “what’s up with all the rhyming?�. In today’s modern times poetry comes in all shapes and sizes, short paragraphs to long, book like poems. The fact that I can’t always figure out the meaning of a poem is actually appealing to me. I like to puzzle it out and draw my own inferences.

I torture my staff at the art center where I work by sending out a poem of the week. The one I most recently sent out over Valentine’s Day, I have re-printed below. I think it is one of the most lovely, intense poems I’ve read in a long time. Quite a few folks did not understand it. I’m going to try and interpret what I believe the poem means here but I invite others to offer their own interpretation or join some of my staff in their bewilderment.

Desire

This desire
is a kind of sleeping,
a kind of forgetting,
a lost childhood.

I begin to see myself as a skin cave,
dark, without details.
You and I are there having tea,
stirring the tea with our bones,
each with our own bones.

I would drink your reflection
but I cannot find the cup,
I cannot find my hands.

---author Jennifer Tseng

I think this poem speaks to the visceral qualities of desire and how it gets wrapped up in childhood longing and feels so physical and primal. I love the stanza of stirring the tea with our bones and of wanting to drink the other’s reflection. That is what desire is like—wanting to dive into someone else, and possess them. And then not being able to find her hands in my mind refers to the very concept of desire. You want something but actually haven’t achieved your goal, otherwise it wouldn’t be desire to begin with.

Ah-ha! So is it all clear now? For all I know I’ve gotten the interpretation completely wrong and infuriated the author. But that’s what is great about poetry. It is intensely personal to the individual who reads it and understands the content in relation to him or herself. It really is for anyone and everyone.


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