The Pursuit of Poetry

Poetry can come at you at just the wrong time. Like when you are fifteen or sixteen and the only things that matter in life are girls and baseball. I mean poetry was for those kids who smarmed their way into the teacher's good graces, kids who got a briefcase for Christmas and bragged about it.

Poems were all about meter and iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets and other annoying abstractions. On every exam there was usually a memory work question and if you could memorize the thing, you could pick up a fast 15 marks. You could then move on to important things.

Like girls and baseball.

Then, out of the blue, when least expected, along comes a special English teacher who opens the poetry chest and extracts magic. In my case the teacher was a tall, spare Basilian priest from Prince Edward Island named Joe Penny. It was grade eleven and the poem he startled me with was Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas. Penny had a soft, high-pitched voice and as he read it, the words seemed to float on his every breath.

And when he reached: "Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea", I could hardly swallow.

That began what has become a life's pursuit of poetry in all its forms. And as you know, poetry is often featured on this program, currently in the form of Life Lines, where people talk about a particular poem which has had a profound impact on their lives.

We Canadians love our poets. From Bliss Carman to Irving Layton to Margaret Atwood, P.K. Page and Lorna Crozier, we give them pride of place at our culture table. We honour them, we read about them and most importantly we read their work. On Thursday, the world's richest poetry award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, was won by Canadian Anne Carson. It was her second win. Her poetry is often abstract and can be difficult.

But poetry is not an easy thing. It is a most subversive art, in that it infiltrates slowly rather than confronts. Prose and plays and non-fiction are easy to grasp. We ask of a poem, what does it mean? Instead we should ask, how does it sound, do the words and the cadent rhythms flatter or offend the ear? Understanding is a by-product, collateral to the central mission of the poem, which is the measured and coherent manipulation of the language, of the words themselves.

Well, that can turn a lot of people off. Especially people who look for meaning in everything.

Does this make modern poetry irrelevant? This past week saw an attack, or at least a warning, that this is happening. Jeremy Paxman, host of the BBC news program Newsnight and probably the most famous journalist in the UK, levelled a broadside at poetry as an art form which had "connived at its own irrelevance."

Said Paxman: "It seems to me very often that poets now seems to be talking to other poets and that is not talking to people as a whole." He called for a kind of inquisition, where poets would be called to publicly account for their work, defend it in some way in a Citizens' Poetry Court. He does have a point: The minute poets stop speaking to people and talk only to each other, the whole enterprise goes on life support.

Poets were our first oral communicators; Homer, blind as he was, Ovid, Virgil, Dante, the Bardic Celts, it was their way of telling our stories. We should be grateful they are still doing it.