Why Do Young Men Give Up Poetry?
Wallace StevensNow having circulated among writers in D.C. I have found several things confirmed. One of these is that several young writers (myself included) enjoyed and even wrote poetry in their formative years - even into college. Then they gave it up. Why?
I've tried hard to figure this out and have come up with some preliminary observations.
My first observation is that poetry, at least as I remember writing it, took quite a lot of time to compose. As a teenager I had no car and was a bit of a night owl. Spending four or five hours over several nights on twenty lines of poetry was much easier to do. Also if one writes for a living or writes for money at all, poetry is not economical. No one is going to pay for poetry, are they? And now that I've had some time to learn about the world I can spend those same 20 hours or so researching and writing an article that fetches a few hundred dollars.
Another reason I suspect young men give up poetry is because poetry comes easier out of disturbed or heightened emotional states - which, I don't have to remind you, occur frequently in suburban adolescence. One hopes that these are quite a bit less frequent when you grow up. What is left then? Technique, craft and dedication. Sounds like work to me. Even granting that I may have had some of these things - still I found myself trying to induce those states.It is difficult to lead an adult life if you essentially lock yourself up for three days with little food, light or sleep - coming out with only seven verses. It was my greatest work - and yet only a half dozen people ever read it.
Also, being a poet seems to attract a certain subset of female peers in high school. Not so much in college or later - which is a shame. Maybe there are a few women who would like to date or marry a working poet - but I imagine these women wear thick black velvet dresses and too much eye-liner.
Finally it seems that poetry in English is dying or dead. It has become so precious that it has no life. Poetry and jazz in America are like two slumped over octogenarians in wheelchairs and on respirators. Even their loved ones recoil at the sight of them in their current states. Who wants to hang out here?
I'm glad however that good teachers and my adolescence conspired to inscribe a few poems onto my consciousness. Last week after eating the best Chinese food I've had in a long time I was confronted with a friend's bookshelf. Unlike many I've seen in D.C. - this one had literature and poetry. I took down a volume of Wallace Stevens' work. I read my favorite verse of his, from "Six Significant Landscapes"
II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.
Another friend, who also now lives in D.C. asked me almost seven years ago what this meant. "Why does this verse 'just blow you away'?" I think commentary is unnecessary here as I thought it was then. But every few years I find a night where I mouth those words to myself - "Like a bracelet/Shaken in a dance" as I walk into the darkness away from something or someone that has just confounded and delighted me.
Poetry doesn't need a blogathon here on SwD - but I've lately become convinced that by losing poetry in our culture we are losing something vital. The first step towards recovering is not hectoring the schools, but recovering it in myself. To that end, I'll be putting my volume of Frank O'Hara's collected works by my bedside. And yes there are plenty of funny jokes to be had here.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Culture
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Reader Comments (9)
I too love Wallace Stevens - the simple vivid lines evoke so much more than what's written. Commentary is indeed unnecessary, but that's sort of the point of poetry overall.
Whenever I need a soupcon of calming inspiration, I remember my William Carlos Williams...
"This Is Just To Say"
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Here is my favorite of his poems:
Planting a Sequoia
All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
Of an old year coming to an end.
In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth–
An olive or a fig tree–a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s orchard,
A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,
A promise of new fruit in other autumns.
But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord,
All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.
We will give you what we can–our labor and our soil,
Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.
We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
A slender shoot against the sunset.
And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
His mother’s beauty ashes in the air,
I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.
With age, this drive and talent tends to fade, unless the author does extraordinary things to keep it alive (e.g., Nabokov refused to ever acquire a permanent residence, instead house-sitting each year for a different Cornell professor going on sabbatical so he wouldn't forget his childhood homes in Russia -- his wife was a saint).
I wonder whether the tendency toward alcoholism among writing men isn't associated with the fading of the lyric talent -- after a few drinks, the visible world takes on again that luminosity and intensity that it had all the time when you were 18.
I do like to believe that Dylan Thomas' last words were "I've had 18 straight whiskeys, I think that is a record."
I find that if I'm in the mood to write poetry, I'm probably in a mood that is unpleasant for others, tiring and anti-social. This mood is something that women discourage in men and so even if women like poetry, very few of them would like an adult poet.
There is a fine line between insecurity and sensitivity, and I would say that in poets this line is almost indistinguishable. Everyone is sensitive & insecure as an adolescent, and this is hidden by our very thick armor of irascible, churlish rebellion, Perhaps the poetry phase is something we need to go through creatively in order to help sort through it all? Poetry is also a private art - it's spoken, yes, but you can also "affirm it, then burn it" too. Perhaps this is why it's an art so many people try at this time in life? An art that no one else ever sees? Almost all of the poetry I've written (and I too haven't done much since about 22,) has never been read or heard by another soul.
My contention is that young published poets are very brave indeed...putting all of that sensitive insecurity out there for everyone to read. Just the thought of it gives me uncomfortable chills!