“Poetry is a living art, it’s living in each and every one of us all the time. We just have to recognize it.”
– George Elliott Clarke
Canada’s new parliamentary poet laureate, the poet of the nation, is going to sort me out.
I can’t properly trace my disdain for poetry, where the roots are of the eye rolling that almost inevitably takes place when I’m presented with a tower of disjointed syllables ambling over otherwise perfectly good white space. Maybe it’s the editor in me that repulses from the lack of punctuation, the line breaks that seem purposefully artful, or the use of metaphors and similes that swoop far beyond my terribly literal mind.
Maybe it’s the way I learned poetry, as probably a lot of school children did, through rules of haiku and iambic pentameter, bashing my juvenile thoughts into the correct form to get a jolly red check mark or smiley-face sticker at the top of the page. And in junior high school poetry was memorization. I don’t remember appreciating the words, only standing up in class, reading aloud what I could remember of two roads diverged and I love thee to the depth and breadth and height.
In the two summer schools I attended during my MFA years, student reading nights were a mixed bag of rusty memoir and imperfect prose that always had me delightedly transfixed. Until a poet would take the podium and I’d be lost, thinking not of their words but of my need for a coffee, a snack, a nap, fresh air – anything but what I was getting, what I derisively labelled tree poems for their heady Canadian need to reference our glorious wilderness. I’m sure the pieces I presented were much more than that, I just couldn’t hear it.
But it is that intersection of writing genres that compels me to not give up on myself as an appreciator – if not lover and probably not writer – of poetry. My primary genre, non-fiction and more specifically memoir, does all the better when a writer has an appreciation of poetic imagery and language. And there are scores of memoirists that live between the worlds of poetry and memoir with beautiful results. If nothing else, I am interested what poetry has to teach me about words and language.
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Our new national poet laureate seems like the one to sort me out. Clarke, whom I remember taking a workshop from as a rural Nova Scotian teenager, has the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada, a litany of honours, degrees, awards, titles. He was poet laureate of Toronto and he’s a U of T professor. As I rebecome Canadian and Nova Scotian after many years away, I am keen to have him introduce this place to me again. He’s going to write about our national occasions: the sesquicentennial of Canada, the Halifax Explosion, significant state events.
But it also sounds like he wants us to embrace the poetry in the every day. In an interview with CBC, which rather groaningly started with clips cribbed from YouTube of our Natural Splendour (have we trademarked the polar bears yet?) that would inspire those tree poems, Clarke came with plans to bring poetry to the people, choosing to read excepts of his a piece called Principles of Good Governance. Here’s the CBC report, and the poem in full on the City of Toronto’s website.
And I read that poem and I think, that’s great. And then I think, am I getting it? Because that’s been another thing about poetry. Somewhere within, I secretly know I’m just not getting it. I’m not literary-nights-in-smoky-cafes enough for poetry. I hope Clarke would call me out on that, because apparently we’re all poets and we just don’t know it.
“People don’t recognize the poetry that’s all around us, all the time,” he said during the CBC piece. “We need compressed and strong and powerful and imagistic language in order to capture our emotions and express our emotions and our ideas in a succinct way that might appeal to others, or at least let others know where we’re coming from, what we really think, or what our hearts are saying to us.”
I’m spending a new year in an old place and what my heart is saying is listen, to the words and the language and the stories they are telling.