Poetry on the Offense

 

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I get a bit annoyed when I see online discussions about the "death of poetry" or "in defense of poetry."  Sometimes those headlines are more clickbait than anything and end up talking about about the popularity and power of poetry. Still, it is annoying that poets and lovers of poetry feel a need to defend what they love because it is under attack.

Poetry as an oral art form likely predates written text. The earliest poetry is believed to have been recited or sung, as a way of remembering oral history, genealogy, and even law. Early writing shows clear traces of older oral traditions, including the use of repeated phrases as building blocks in larger poetic units. A rhythmic and repetitious form would make a long story easier to remember and retell, before writing was available as a reminder. 

People still read ancient works, from the Vedas (1500 - 1000 BC) to the Odyssey (800 - 675 BC), which appear to have been composed in poetic form to aid memorization and oral transmission.

Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures, with poetic fragments found on early monoliths, runestones, and stelae.

Deluge tablet of the Gilgamesh epic, circa 2nd millennium BC.

A 2015 article says that "Some people are still reading [poetry], although that number has been dropping steadily over the past two decades. In 1992, 17 percent of Americans had read a work of poetry at least once in the past year. 20 years later that number had fallen by more than half, to 6.7 percent." Jump to a 2018 NEA report which said that it seems to be more popular than ever. “Nearly 12 percent (11.7 percent) of adults read poetry in the last year, according to new data from the National Endowment for the Arts' 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). That's 28 million adults.

On the defensive side, a Washington Post article with the headline "Poetry is going extinct government-data show" is actually saying that "Poetry is not dying, it is merely changing. Poetry is essential to human life. It allows us to convey our thoughts and emotions through beautiful, sometimes horrible, words."

Is poetry endangered? "Languages are dying at the rate of every two weeks. Of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world over half of these are endangered. By the end of the century half the world's current languages will be lost which will also mean the loss of unique poetic traditions." I don't put poetry in the endangered species category, but the UK "Endangered Poetry Project" is fighting extinction. 

You can find a number of arguments that poetry is not dying, it is merely changing. So, why title this post "Poetry on the Offense"? The war in Ukraine was just the latest example of how poets go on the offense rather than in defense with their writing in hard times. Poetry gives voice to many things - personal and global. 

A search on Ukraine + poetry + war turns up many examples of that.

Poetry I alive, well and in the world every day.

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In Flander Fields

In 1915, following the Second Battle of Ypres, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a physician with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, wrote the poem, "In Flanders Fields". 

Its opening lines refer to the fields of poppies that grew among the soldiers' graves in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern portion of Belgium.

In 1918, inspired by the poem, YWCA worker Moina Michael attended a YWCA Overseas War Secretaries' conference wearing a silk poppy pinned to her coat and distributed more to others present. In 1920, the National American Legion adopted it as their official symbol of remembrance in the U.S.

"In Flanders Fields" is a rondeau, a form fixe of medieval and Renaissance French poetry that was often set to music between the late 13th and the 15th centuries. (But not be confused with the rondo, a classical music form.) 

It is structured around a fixed pattern of repetition involving a refrain, though today it is used both in a wider sense with older variants of the form – which are sometimes distinguished as the triolet and rondel. To be stricter, it refers to a 15-line variant which developed from these forms in the 15th and 16th centuries, and which McCrae used.

The poem's immediate popularity led to it being used to recruit soldiers and raise money selling war bonds, and the reference to the red poppies resulted in the "remembrance poppy"  becoming one of the world's most recognized memorial symbols for soldiers who have died in conflict. 

The poem and poppy are prominent Remembrance Day symbols throughout the Commonwealth of Nations, particularly in Canada, where "In Flanders Fields" is one of the nation's best-known literary works. The poem is also widely known in the United States, where it is associated with Veterans Day and Memorial Day (formerly Decoration Day).

Silk Remembrance Day poppy worn on clothing

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

    Between the crosses, row on row,

  That mark our place; and in the sky

  The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

  Loved and were loved, and now we lie

      In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

  The torch; be yours to hold it high.

  If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

      In Flanders fields.

Other poems commemorating Memorial Day include:

Francis M. Finch's "The Blue and the Gray" 

Michael Anania's "Memorial Day"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Decoration Day"

Joyce Kilmer's "Memorial Day"

Richard Wilbur

I like this quote from poet Richard Wilbur which I think is about one reason that many of us write.

"I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry."

Richard Wilbur was born on this day, March 1, in New York City in 1921. His family included editors and journalists and he may have followed that career, but career decision were put off to serve in the infantry in World War II.

He did not write the soldier and battle poems that might have come from that experience. Instead, he wrote about the solitary, lonelier times of war. He said that he read Edgar Allan Poe in the trenches, and was more likely to write about a night spent peeling potatoes in the Army kitchen than about what it felt like to be on the front line.

His first book of poems, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems was published in 1947.

He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989. A Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets, Wilbur currently lives in Cummington, Massachusetts.

The Writer


In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

See the complete poem and hear it read by the author at  www.poets.org/

Collected Poems 1943-2004

Submit Poems of War and Remembrance

The anthology of classic war poems collected on the About.com poetry pages are in remembrance of those who gave their lives in the many wars fought in human history.

This year with Memorial Day near, they ask you to add some new poems to their war and remembrance collection. You are invited to submit your own poems or suggest your favorite classics.


NOTE: the text box on the submission page doesn’t convey your format accurately when you type a poem into it (a problem that we find on Poets Online with emailed poems) - so use slashes (“/”) to indicate line breaks and double slashes (“//”) to indicate stanzas.

Poetry Makes Nothing Happen: Poems of Protest

I'm still thinking about the issues addressed in my last post and it had me thinking about a line from a W.H. Auden poem that is frequently quoted out of context. It's the line, "Poetry makes nothing happen."

It's often taken to be a negative comment on the effect, or lack thereof, of poetry on the world. Does poetry matter? Knowing Auden, you would have to wonder if that's what he really meant.

Another case like that would be these three lines from William Butler Yeats:

I think it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right.

Actually, both poets had a political side. W.H. Auden went to Spain and supported the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, and Yeats supported Ireland in the uprising against British colonial power. He even served as a Senator for the newly-formed Republic of Ireland.

Here's that line from Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" with a bit more context:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Just three days after Auden arrived in New York in early 1939, news came that W. B. Yeats had died. Yeats was 73; Auden was 31. He quickly wrote "In Memory of W. B. Yeats."

It's not a protest poem in the traditional sense at all. So why is it in his post?

Read the complete poem "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" and you'll see that it has two ideas in it. It starts with unrhymed verse paragraphs that suggest that poets can't do much more than create a way of being remembered. The second section is in stricter form and argues that poetry is more powerful than time or death. There's an unresolved feeling to the poem as to which is true. Perhaps, Auden wasn't completely sure. I'm not sure myself.

Our April prompt is poems of protest. They might be poems against the war or following a prompt from ProtestPoems.org or in protest of what is happening in Tibet or Darfur or any number of world situations. But Poets Online is not a political website. So, your submissions can also be poems of protest against more abstract or personal concerns.

If you feel the need for writing prompts with more meaning, sign up for monthly poetry prompts at ProtestPoems.org and visit the Poets Against the War site. Post a comment below and let us know about other sites that encourage action-poetry.

Back in February 2003, First Lady Laura Bush canceled her symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice" because she learned that some of the poets on her guest list refused to attend in protest against the impending war. A spokesperson for her said that t it would be "inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum." As a reaction to that non-event, the Poets Against the War movement was born. Since then, the group's volunteer editors has reviewed more than 22,000 poems.

And just last month, we crossed the 5 year mark for the war in Iraq. Since 2002, at least 775 men have been held in the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A poetry collection was published in August 2007 that gives voice to the men held at Guantánamo. Poems from Guantánamo has poems by 17 detainees, most of whom are still being held there. The poems may not be poetry of the highest quality, but they are a powerful use of poetry, and they make something happen.


Further Reading
There's an extended discussion online about this in "Conversing With the World: The Poet in Society" by Rachel Galvin.