(Please?)

I told Erica when I saw her on Friday that I thought I needed to switch gears in the poetry discussion we’ve been having, because I was starting to feel overwhelmed by the task of defending an entire medium. (I think poetry is a medium of expression, not a genre. It contains genres within it. And you wouldn’t call prose a genre.)

Anyway, I started to think that although I still believe it’s possible to “explain” poetry, in the end what I really want to say to Erica is: Look — look at these gorgeous things. Without the conventions of poetry, I can’t imagine that they would have been written. Poems, good poems, are their own justification. So I decided that the way I want to continue this conversation is to keep sharing poems that I love (and Erica can keep telling me why she doesn’t like them), until one of us wears the other person down. (E., of course I will still attempt to address specific questions.)

Ready?

Here’s one that I translated from the Hebrew, so in some ways it doesn’t count; still and all, here it is. It might be a tangential way into the things Erica’s been thinking about lately.

A Minute of Silence

Every evening, before sunset,
In my heart, between the pine trees,
My flag lowers
And stands at half- mast.

A minute of silence for words
That withered without being felt,
And a minute of silence for dogs
That weren’t careful of the road.

To the memory of my father the miserable
Who disturbs me in my dreams,
To the memory of spaceships*
That did not land in peace

To the memory of a million legends
That I believed were true,
And the memory of my grandfather who left in me
His dead smile.

A silent and cold minute
To the memory of everything that ends
Listen now to the siren
I have inside my heart.

Yonatan Gefen

*The words here can mean also “ships that were destroyed in war or disaster.”

(Thanks to A. for the book the poem came from.)

P.S. It also rhymes in Hebrew. Neat trick, eh? I can’t translate that well.

P.P.S. Today’s title is apropos also of the happy chaos that was my family’s visit this evening. Asher was grumpy and bumpy and screamy, Ross and I were trying to cook dinner for 6 in three separate pans, my Dad and I were both sick, my sister was tired of her baby, and all was noise and confusion. I think it’s pretty much been like that 24/7 for my family since Asher was born. I hope they all find time for minutes of silence in their days.

I think I’m sick. My head hurts, my throat is sore, and my nose is blocked. I feel listless, and I’m pretty exhausted even though I just napped for an hour. Fortunately, since I can’t possibly be sick what with two sets of families in town, friends showing up this weekend, and a wedding to pull off, it must really be a very convincing hallucination.

Just in case, I got myself an angel when I was in Central Square this morning applying for my marriage license. Which, by the way? Is the easiest thing in the world to do. They don’t even ask for proof of identification of any kind. They just chuckle indulgently at you when you come in together dressed in your shorts and sneakers looking about twelve years old and asking to apply for a marriage license. Oh! They do make you raise your right hand and swear that everything you’ve written down on the forms is true and that there is no legal impediment to your getting married. As Ross is not my father, grandfather, son, grandson, brother, stepfather, grandmother’s husband, daughter’s husband, granddaughter’s husband, husband’s grandfather (presumably we’re now talking about ex-husbands), husband’s son, husband’s grandson, brother’s son, sister’s son, father’s brother or mother’s brother, we were ok there. Phew.

Here’s my angel. He looks a little melancholy, but he’ll do. I figure his orange color will work like vitamin C. Which I should probably go and consume now.

So now do you believe me when I tell you this baby is so cute, it’s unearthly?

I have the best friends in the world. Five of them hurtled together a surprise (sort of) bachelorette party for me last night (which I almost ruined by being cranky last week and telling them I was going to be too tired to do anything) and I cannot tell you how much fun I had. I was going to try to tell you, but I’m still recovering from having the fun, and my head kind of hurts.

Pretty much all you need to know is that we went here, and that last night’s line-up of performers were named Destiny, Maya Montana, Fantasia Mahogany-Brown, and Kris Knevil. They were pretty fabulous… worth every dollar bill they got. ;-)

There was also champagne and fancy raspberry icecubes at Jo’s beforehand, and artichoke dip and mini-quiches, and dancing and scallion pancakes at Hongkong afterwards. And I have the best friends in the world.

See?

(Pictures were taken last night, although not by me. I will try to track them down.)

(Edit: Jenn’s pictures, from before her battery died for the night, are here. I look like a maniac in the champagne-opening one. Enjoy)

From Bookslut a few days ago, this link to a free downloadable version of Kelly Link’s collection of fantasy stories Stranger Things Happen. It is rather marvellous, and if you are in the mood for a non-real-world scare at the moment (since the real-world ones are not in short supply), I recommend the incredibly creepy “The Specialist’s Hat.” It won the World Fantasy Award in 1999 and you can also listen to Kelly Link read it here.

Ok, so I was going to make a post about language and humor, and it was going to be very amusing. I had the third session of my “Level 9 Hebrew class” this evening (which has dwindled to four brave souls, I think largely because of the terrifyingly large number 9), and we’ve been reading a satirical novel about the dot com boom/bust in Israel. I was going to tell you how funny the book is, and how lovely it is to be able to really “get” humor in another language, and how subtle a thing it can be and how you can sometimes understand all of the words and yet not see that something funny has been said, and how important it is to be able to access the culture of the other language, and not just the literal meaning of the words.

And then my entry was going to have a punchline: I was going to tell you how I was going along happily giggling down at the pages tonight, and we got to a part in our reading where a computer programmer made a programming joke, and it was completely incomprehensible to me.

Badump bum.

Anyway, it was going to be really very delightful, because it’s fun to make fun of computer geeks and how weird they are. But then Erica made this post and now I have to talk to you about line breaks and what exactly they’re for again? if you just go and read poetry the way you want to, anyway.

For some of you this is unfathomably boring, and to you I say: Ross the deity gives you free will. You may choose to go away now.

Everyone here of their own free will? Good.

So to recap: Erica wants to know why Rick, her elementary school teacher, read aloud Prospero’s last speech in The Tempest apparently without paying any attention to the physical shape of the poem, slipping over the line breaks and giving the lines natural pauses just where he might pause if the speech were written in prose. And it sounded good, like it was supposed to be read that way.

(You probably want to know why Erica was being read to from The Tempest in elementary school, but let’s leave that one to her.)

The short answer is going to annoy Erica, but I’ll give it anyway: Prospero’s speech is an example of what we very prettily call enjambment, from a French word that means to step across or over. Enjambment in a poem is when the place where a coherent bit of meaning feels complete does not coincide with the end of a line. So you have to “step over” the line break in order to finish a thought. (When the end of a line is the same thing as the end of a bit of a meaning, we call it an end-stopped line.)

In other words, Prospero’s speech isn’t supposed to be read with pauses at the ends of the lines because the ends of the lines in Prospero’s speech literally aren’t sensible places to pause. If you just pause there, the poem doesn’t make sense.

But that’s a circular answer, and is understandably frustrating. So what’s a better response to Erica’s excellent question?

Keeping in mind that dissertations have probably been written on the subject, and that there is much more out there if you’re really interested, here is my response:

Despite what your teacher may have told you (and what I may have told my hapless students), a line break in a poem does not really exist in order to “tell” you where to pause. Its fundamental purpose is not to dictate how the words are read aloud, although it can and should and will influence your out-loud reading in various ways. That’s why enjambment is ok, and even desirable in many poems.

So, fine. It’s not (at least not first of all) some clear signal about when to pause when you’re reading out loud. Then what’s a line break really for?

I already warned you that you might not like the answer, right? Ok.

Let’s first accept that line breaks in poetry are not for the listener. Does that make sense, based on what I’ve just said? Remember that the listener cannot really hear line breaks, although he or she might be able to guess at them, when listening to certain poems whose rhythm coincides particularly well with their form.

If line breaks are not for the listener, then they must be for the looker. (Yes, people who read poetry are a damn fine lot.)

Seriously. Line breaks are for the only person who can see them — the person looking at the poem. Which means that they fundamentally serve some kind of visual purpose. Yup. We can talk till we’re blue in the face about the music of poetry, and a poem read out loud is a thing of wondrous joy indeed, but that is not all that’s going on here. The way you respond to a poem, the way you read it, involves several senses and baby, one of the most important ones is sight.

Line breaks are there because they are the best way to create two simultaneous and contradictory feelings in the reader. They are there in order to make the reader feel both satisfied and expectant. The satisfaction comes, if the poet has done his or her job well, because something about the end of the line makes sense rhythmically. In the case of Prospero’s speech, most of that rhythmic sense comes from the rhyme (and I’m not just talking about the perfect rhymes, although they’re very important here). The expectation, in this case, comes mostly from the enjambment itself — the thought is not complete at the end of a line, and the reader expects the end of it to come. In the case of “On Turning Ten,” the expectation comes, often, because the reader wants a question to be answered that hasn’t been answered by the end of a line. (How does turning ten make you feel? What’s it like coming down with?) Different poems achieve these feelings differently, and some poems don’t achieve them at all; other poems contain a few line breaks that “work” and a few line breaks that “don’t work.” But this, at the heart of it, is what it’s about.

That’s why a poem feels different when you take away its line breaks, even if all else stays the same. You’ve taken away the visual cues that create this shifting ebb and flow of satisfaction and expectation in the reader. It’s a movement of feeling that’s incredibly difficult to articulate, which is why you’ll hear people talking about the music and the rhythm of a poem — poems do have music and rhythm, of course — they’re built out of them — but part of what contributes to that comes from the eyes before it ever gets to the ears.

There is much more to the “Why Poetry?” question, but for me this is a big part of it.

E.?