poetry and relevance

Poetry and RelevanceAuthor(s): William OsborneSource: Interpretations, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1971), pp. 56-69Published by: Scriptorium PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23239796 .

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Poetry and Relevance

The topic you assigned me is certainly a formidable one, and with

your permission I should like to divide it into two smaller ones. For my first topic 1 am indebted to the Winston tobacco people and their

interest in good grammar and other things of the mind. Herewith my unsubtle subtitle: "Question: What do you want? Good grammar or

good taste? Answer: I want good taste in grammar." As you can see,

this establishes at once my conservative bias, but I have another subtitle

that will, I hope, bring joy to the liberal hearts here, and thus keep all

of you breathlessly awaiting portentous utterance. Here is my liberal

title: "How to Breed Good Revolutionaries in Order That the Present

Revolution Will Have a Less Boring Rhetoric and a More Rational Pro

gram for Change."

Having established both a conservative and a liberal tone to my

presentation, I will rush at once to my thesis, a simple one which takes

both points of view into account. We must listen to and learn as much

from our students as we possibly can, but we must preserve the best in

the English language by teaching them the skillful use of it by literary

experts. When we listen patiently, when we do not disapprove of our

students' tastes in literature, when we observe their dress, coiffure,

language, and behaviour without sternly criticizing (even though we

might disapprove), we have our best chance of being relevant to them as

individuals. When we teach not only idea but form, when we demon

strate the effectiveness of language skillfully used, when we show them

the powerlessness of writing that has neither clarity nor grace, we have

our best chance of proving the relevance of our subject, and, inciden

tally, of contributing to a more interesting rhetoric on their part.

My objective this morning is to provide you, if 1 can, with a

defense against various blasts from our young revolutionaries, blasts

that often come in the form of persistent questions, such as (1) Why do

my teachers care how I speak as long as 1 communicate? (2) Why

should we trust anyone over thirty? and (3) Why do we have to read

"old" writers instead of the "new" ones?

1 shall take up these questions separately and try to tell you how

I would attempt to answer them.

First, what difference does it make how we say it, so long as we

communicate?

This is a question the very asking of which betrays the student's

failure to understand the nature of language. If mere communication is

all we want, we can revert to gibberish and gesture, thereby sacrificing

all the nuances and shades of meaning that our language possesses and

which the human intellect is capable of assimilating and utilizing for

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precise and colorful communication. Has civilization refined and de

veloped the English language thus far only to be told that grunts and

gestures and growls will do as well? I trust not. And though primitive

speech and behaviour seem attractive to some people in our society, I

trust that we do not really want to return to the trees or to an absence

of verbal distinction. Mr. T. S. Eliot in one of his poems speaks of

"purifying the dialect of the tribe," one of the objectives, I take it of

serious literature. If the favorite art form of our young people today is

the rock musical, rather than books, I do not believe that we can

depend much upon it to purify the language, though it is incredible

how many of our students rush to popular songs and musicals for words

to live by. Songs and rock musicals of our time have assumed an

enormous significance for the young, amounting in many instances to

an ardor resembling religious fervor. "Let the Sun Shine In" is no

panacea for the world's ills, though such oversimplifications as this send

profound reverberations into the youth of our time, as does the slogan, "Make Love, Not War." This phrase, incidentally, interests me. I get the

image of America becoming one vast bacchanal, everyone running about clutching his neighbor in passionate embrace. And though this

would be preferred to killing one's neighbor, remember what Mr.

Malthus told us about the population explosion! Our young friends need to know, then, that their influence is

utterly lost on many of their contemporaries when they succumb to

oversimplified doctrine, when they abuse the language by oversimplifi

cation, and when they use imprecise language to express their ideas. I

am sure that you have been as startled as I by the dullness of the

revolutionary rhetoric that has accompanied many of their utterances,

locally and nationally. Multiple misspellings, incorrect usage, uncertain

grammar, and mixed metaphors have characterized many of their mani

festoes. A recent article in the AA UP Bulletin criticized Mario Savio,

the Berkeley student leader, for elementary errors in logic in many of

his speeches, and last spring I heard a student cite Edgar Guest, of all

people, to buttress one of his arguments, but he attributed the quota

tion to a student in another university. Such plagiarism would be laugh

able were it not for the utter acquiescence and credulousness of most of

his audience, who were so captivated by the cliches and emotion

charged phrases that they never really considered what was being said.

If we are to have student unrest, upheaval, or even revolution, let us

urge a more reasonable rhetoric from it so that we can ourselves partici

pate in it, persuaded by the sanity, balance, and provocativeness of the

ideas. We desperately need to understand these people, and they des

perately need to learn from us how best to communicate the most

subtle of their notions. Our answer, then, to the first question is that

life is far more complex than most people realize, and no one can

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communicate precisely with another being until he recognizes the im

portant distinctions between synonyms and between a word used in

one context and the same word used in another context. We must

recognize the differences between "fire," "flame," and "conflagration," to choose an obvious example of words which, incidentally, some of

my freshmen think have identical meanings. Important ideas cannot be

transmitted by grunts or gestures or oversimplification. We need all the

resources of the mother tongue. Mature ideas require mature expres sion. Mature expression requires knowledge of the language.

Second, why should we trust anyone over thirty? This attitude is part of the historical "hang-up" many of our

students are experiencing. One of the quickest ways 1 know of to

disabuse those who feel this way is to remind them that there are first

and second graders coming along who in about a dozen years will be

distrusting the present crop of high school seniors and who will be

seeking reasons why they should trust those seniors who, by then, will

be among the over-thirty group. Ours is a pragmatic age, and our young

oeople want to know what we have done to make the world healthier. I

:annot speak for the present high school seniors and their parents, but I

;an tell you what a very wise man of a recent generation told a gradu

ting class at Northwestern University. Professor Bergen Evans, a

_;holar of your parents' generation, pointed out some of the remark

able achievements of his and his parents' generations, and the list is

impressive, whatever you choose to think about the hypocrisy or com

placency or bigotry of that same generation. Professor Evans noted that

within the past few decades we had managed to accomplish the

following:

1. We increased life expectancy by 50%.

2. We virtually eliminated two plagues: polio and tuberculosis.

3. We made education available to the masses.

4. We effected a social revolution in the '30's that dwarfed the

French and Russian Revolutions in its humanitarian conse

quences. 5. We defeated a Hitler, contained a Stalin, and made a

Khrushchev back down.

6. We gave billions of dollars to nations we had spent billions

to defeat in war—this to prevent a devastating world depres sion.

7. We plunged downward into the atom and then upward into

outer space. 8. We produced an exciting architecture and literature. (Our

literary giants died only recently: Hemingway, Eliot, Frost,

and Faulkner.)

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And so to the question of why trust anyone over thirty, we

answer confidently: Because we made a contribution. And we, along with those first and second graders are waiting to see what the present

generation will contribute. Meanwhile they dare not turn their backs on

qualified experience, no matter how many blunders they detect in our

behavior, because they need us, just as we need them. The idea of a

generation gap is naive. The only gaps that really exist are experience

gaps, and these have little to do with chronological age. Some of our

high school and college youngsters have the ability and maturity of

individuals twice their ages. And many of us over thirty have the men

tality of sixth graders. To ignore the wisdom inherent in each of these

generations would be unfortunate, if not catastrophic.

My colleagues will probably never forgive me for being so didactic

and for commenting on matters which appear foreign to the studies of

an English professor. Let me therefore rush to the final question and to

a literary defense of my answer, lest I be forever relegated to the ranks

of a Boanerges. The final question, stated in three ways, comes to the heart of

most of our students' complaints: Why isn't the study of English rele

vant? Why must we read "old" writers? Why can't we read contempo

rary writers?

Some of my students believe that the only relevant literature is

literature of protest against the Establishment. Have you noticed that

the new textbooks are burgeoning with protest literature? Let me say

very quickly that 1 oppose the war in Viet Nam, that I believe racial

prejudice is immoral, and that 1 deplore pollution of our waterways and

atmosphere. Who does not? But 1 do not in the least feel that the only relevant literature is that which focuses on these subjects. Have you seen the New Yorker cartoon which pictures a pianist at Carnegie Hall

preparing to begin his recital? Instead of seating himself at the piano and playing Chopin, he walks to the front of the stage and says,

"Before I begin my concert, Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to

make a statement about American foreign policy." How cleverly that

cartoon makes my point. Good literature has no axes to grind, espouses no religious denomination, embraces no particular political philosophy,

preaches no sermons directly. It deals powerfully with the unchanging human predicament as seen by a writer whose sympathies are so broad

and whose perspective so keen that his utterance spans the centuries.

Let us face it: a badly written essay dealing with, say, racial

injustice is still a bad essay. We must not permit our emotional response

to our favorite ideas to blind us to aesthetic considerations-that is, to

those values that Professor J. Mitchell Morse has been writing about in

recent issues of College English-clarity, precision, forcefulness, and

grace. We must choose carefully those models we wish to present to our

59



students. If an essay contains our favorite form of liberalism or conser

vatism but is presented with errors in logic, with specious reasoning, with inaccurate word choice, with emotive utterance unaccompanied

by rational justification, or with general infelicity of word choice, we

do our students an injustice to present that essay as a model to be

imitated. One of the best ways we can assist our students to give us a more

interesting rhetorical response to what is wrong with society is to teach

them the idea of Form in literature. 1 confess I do not know why students have such a difficult time grasping the idea of poetic form

when it is so easy for them to be attracted to modern songs. If they would reflect for a moment they would see that their favorite songs attract them for two reasons—the words and the music. And though each of these is distinctly different, if you eliminate one, you destroy the total effect. So it is with poetic form: it is not only the words, or

what is being said; it is also the arrangement, interaction, and the selec

tion of words, or how it is being said.

Let us take the first two items below as our illustration:

(1) I, Why?

(2) "I do not understand why I exist."

Which of the two is more poetic? Obviously the first, because of its

brevity and balance—in a word, its form. The prose paraphrase does not

catch the suggestibility of the two words placed in balanced, rhyming

pattern. The first suggests, while the second states; and this, of course,

is one difference between poetry and paraphrase. The second statement

is abstract, flat, and devoid of interesting form. The first is personal,

concrete, and relevant to the human predicament. Its form accom

plishes this. Form is not always this easy to grasp, however, and students must

learn to be patient in their attempts to grasp it. The tendency nowadays

is to prefer what is less difficult to understand, and to read everything

as though it were a newspaper. "Feel more and think less," as Professor

Morse puts it. Instant poetry, like instant breakfast or instant coffee, is

what many of our students (and perhaps large segments of the general

public) want. What is needed, it seems to me, is for all of us to cultivate

the complex, to seek out the serious (as opposed to the frivolous or

inconsequential), and to master the mature artists. I trust that I am not

merely a victim of the Protestant Ethic when I ask you to urge your

students to prefer that literature which takes more time and effort to

assimilate, but which will almost certainly remain longer with

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them—will, in fact, stick to their minds longer than much that appears "relevant." The alternative to this, I fear, is to throw out Milton and

Donne and Shakespeare and Eliot and everyone else who was devoted

to structure and form. If we cannot show our students the relevance of

literary form, along with the relevance of ideas, we might as well not

have poems, plays, and stories. Essays in shorthand would do as well.

Paraphrases and summaries would suffice. Without Form, there can be

no genuine literature.

Recently I asked one of my students to tell me which of two

poems was, in his opinion, superior, and I presented him with the

following:

Western Wind

Western wind, when will thou blow?

The small rain down can rain.

Christ, that my love were in my arms,

And I in my bed again.

People

Walkin' down the main street,

Faces are all I see.

I'm jostlin' through the busy crowds

And no one looks at me.

I'm lonely. God, I'm lonely,

Lonely as can be.

Walkin' down the crowded street

Where no one looks at me.

My student gave the poems a fairly quick reading and then announced

proudly that he had made a decision. The second of the two, he told

me, was without doubt the better poem. When I asked for a justifica

tion, he told me repeatedly that the second poem was "easier to under

stand," and that it had "a message for his generation" that the first

poem did not have. I let it go at that, not wishing to engage this student

in a discussion I felt he could not win, since 1 had written the second

"poem" myself in about two minutes, patterning it on any number of

recent lyrics I had heard sung by the heroes of many of my students.

1 decided to let the class deal with the two poems, hoping that

their collective wisdom might annihilate forever my flimsy sentimental

verse. Fortunately for me, this device worked, and my student's class

mates opposed strenuously his choice of poems, settling his hash and

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my stomach for the time being by bringing to the fore the very best

kinds of arguments. They noted at once the maudlin quality of my

"poem," its obviousness, its lack of what they (rightly) called "authen

ticity." Though they did not understand all of the levels of meaning of

"Western Wind," they recognized the power inherent in its form. When

I told them that it was one of the most famous medieval lyrics in our

language, they were extremely pleased with themselves. And they should have been, because in their discussion they caught most of the

implications of the poem. From this particular experience I learned something: rather than

engage in argument with one student about the merits of poetry, it is

far better to bring the whole class into the fray, and to trust in their

collective sanity to make a reasonable judgment. Perhaps this faith

might occasionally be misplaced, but 1 think it is certainly worth trying. I believe you will become a relevant teacher when you request your students to bring to class their favorite poems or the poems they regard as truly great literary efforts. If you can entice them to do this, you can

then bring to class for comparison poems you know on the same theme, and in the ensuing comparison make whatever points you want to

make, but this time with poems of their choice. Even if your arguments

appear unconvincing, you will still have learned a great deal about the

tastes and analytical abilities of your students, so that on the next

occasion you will have a better chance, perhaps, of persuading them.

What is important in these encounters, it seems to me, is that you

respect your students' current tastes in literature, with the idea of

enlarging their perspectives and enriching their propensities. Let me return to my point about the relevance of poetic form.

For this I will cite two more poems, both of which use free verse, but

only one of which, in my opinion, uses it successfully.

EMPTY IS

Empty is

the sky before the sun wakes up the morning.

The eyes of animals in cages.

The faces of women mourning

when everything has been taken,

from them.

Me?

Don't ask me about empty.

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Empty is a string of dirty days

held together by some rain

and the cold wind drumming at the trees again.

Empty is the color of the fields

along about September when the days go marching

in a line toward November.

Empty is the hour before sleep kills you every night then pushes you to safety

away from every kind of light.

Empty is me.

Empty is me.

WHEN I HEARD THE LEARN'D ASTRONOMER

When 1 heard the learn'd astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When 1 was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in

the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

I fail to see the purpose in the first poem of the uneven stanzas

and the separation of some of the sentences. My students admire this

poem, but I am unmoved by the abstractness of stanza three and the

obviousness of the speaker's gloom. He tells me he is empty, but then

he shifts my attention from him to sky, animals, women, and fields.

Stanza one does not correspond with the closer organization of stanzas

two, three, and four. "Empty is me" is, of course, a more poetic state

ment than "I am empty" or "I am sad," but I believe a change in its

form would have been advantageous. Because of the form of line 1, it

would have been more effective to conclude the poem with "Empty is"

on one line, and "me" on the final line. Suspense would thereby be

gained, and the poet might not have needed to repeat "Empty is me,"

as if he were afraid we would miss the point.

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The companion poem deals with emptiness too, but of a different

kind, and the poet's form accomplishes almost as much as his words. I

would call your attention to the patterned repetition "When I . . .

and to the gradual lengthening of the lines, both devices of which

heighten the speaker's increasing boredom at the lecture. I would have

you note, too, the regularity of the first and last lines, one a trochaic

pentameter and the other an iambic pentameter. All of the material

between lacks a regular rhythm. The last line takes on more power because the speaker's sudden return to the mystical sense of orderliness

in the universe is reinforced by an orderly iambic pentameter. Not a

great poem, perhaps, but one in which form plays a vital, integral part, without which the poem could not mean what it means. Incidentally,

Rod McKuen wrote the first poem and Walt Whitman the second.

I will cite two more poems on similar themes for you to glance at

in order to see the kinds of defense you might wish to use if your

students had presented you with the first of the two. There is an

interesting irony in my choice of these poems, because one was written

by Karl Shapiro, the arch foe of the other poet, Rod McKuen. What

better hall of justice, or battlefield, than our classroom. Incidentally I

have chosen poems by respectable poets (but certainly not the giants of

literature) to show you that students need not be intimidated by the

so-called masters. There are many fine poems written by relatively un

known poets, and it may be strategically advisable occasionally to draw

on one of them, or even to omit altogether the name of the poet under

consideration.

The point I should like to make in my brief discussion of the two

poems is that though they have similar subjects, one of them has a

superior structure and form. The first is McKuen's, the second Sha

piro's.

AN EVENT OF SOME IMPORTANCE

I started up the hill

and there they were.

One of them was hardly twenty, the other maybe more.

They were still.

Dead I knew.

I slowed but didn't stop.

A cop was waving traffic past. No ambulance had yet arrived

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but two police cars kept a guard on the coroner's new dibs.

One bike was halfway up a wall

the front wheel still spinning. The other, folded over like a half-left

sandwich,

grew like sculpture in the middle of the road

and blossomed with the red of one of them.

1 didn't know which one.

Looking back

from further up the hill

I saw one cop strike up some flares.

Still no sirens in the distance.

5 Traffic now crawled up behind me

slowly till we hit Mulholland

and the other side.

Down below was Christmas

as it always is.

10 Searchlights.

Perhaps a used-car lot

was opening

or another shop

with shiny motorcycles.

15 The evening paper in the driveway once again. I picked it up before I parked the car.

Inside 1 sat down with a cup of coffee

20 and wrote a poem on what it's like

to miss a falling star.

Perhaps I should have made a wish

on one of the many searchlights,

biting at the clouds,

25 More dependable than stars

In California.

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AUTO WRECK

1 Its quick soft silver bell beating, beating,

And down the dark one ruby flare

pulsing out red light like an artery,

The ambulance at top speed floating down

5 Past beacons and illuminated clocks

Wings in a heavy curve, dips down,

And brakes speed, entering the crowd.

The doors leap open, emptying light;

Stretchers are laid out, the mangled lifted

10 And stowed into the little hospital.

Then the bell, breaking the hush, tolls once,

And the ambulance with its terrible cargo

Rocking, slightly rocking, moves away,

As the doors, an afterthought, are closed.

15 We are deranged, walking among the cops

Who sweep glass and are large and composed.

One is still making notes under the light.

One with a bucket douches ponds of blood

20 Into the street and gutter.

One hangs lanterns on the wrecks that cling,

Empty husks of locusts, to iron poles.

Our throats were tight as tourniquets,

Our feet were bound with splints, but now,

Like convalescents intimate and gauche, We speak through sickly smiles and warn

25 With the stubborn saw of common sense,

The grim joke and the banal resolution.

The traffic moves around with care,

But we remain, touching a wound

30 That opens to our richest horror.

Already old, the question Who shall die?

Becomes unspoken Who is innocent?

For death in war is done by hands;

Suicide has cause and stillbirth, logic;

35 And cancer, simple as a flower, blooms.

But this invites the occult mind,

Cancels our physics with a snear,

And splatters all we knew of denouement

Across the expedient and wicked stones.

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I have three major reservations about the quality of "An Event of

Some Importance": its beginning, middle and end! On a more serious

note, I find important failures in diction, rhythm, and imagery. The

title I like because it sets the tone of sardonic understatement in the

poem, and this represents, to my mind, the poem's chief value: it is a

poem about the apparent irrelevance of the death of young cyclists killed in an accident on a highway.

The theme is certainly an important one, though the poet's casual

rhythm and diction do not help him to structure the theme. When he

isolates, portentously, lines 5, 6, and 7, we expect something of poetic

import, but we find instead prosaic comment. Line 11 has the slangy "coroner's new dibs" which contributes successfully to the sardonic

tone I mentioned earlier. The mixed imagery of the next stanza might be defended as reinforcing the grotesqueness of the death scene, though 1 suspect rather that it is a failure of the imagination to unite

successfully the images of sandwich, sculpture, and blossom. "I didn't

know which one" is poetically gratuitous. The narrator, stunned by the

senseless death of the young cyclists, then returns to his home, where

he continues to react to what he has seen. He hints that somehow the

cyclists' death was sponsored by civilization's Christmas complex

(fourth stanza from the end). He seats himself before his cup of coffee

and writes a poem about "what it's like/to miss a falling star." The

thinking from this point becomes muddled and confused. We might have expected "miss a falling star" to be an allusion to Donne's "Go

and catch a falling star," but the analogy breaks down when we reflect

that Donne was saying that it is as easy to catch a falling star as it is to

find an honest woman. How does this relate to the poem under

discussion? It doesn't, but presumably the poet hopes we will respond in some way to the Donne echo. By pushing the analogy we might make a connection between the reliability of Donne's women and the

stars of California, but the connection calls for more cerebral activity than the rest of the poem, and takes us away from what I think is the

poem's purpose. Remember Mr. Coleridge's famous advice to young

poets: "Prose—words in their best order; poetry—the best words in their

best order." I cannot believe that we are getting best words in their best

order in this last stanza or the stanza preceding. The poem lacks steady

concentration on a central idea, and leaves the reader with generalized

impressions about the speaker's despondency. Mr. Sharpiro's poem on the same theme has a strong sense of

form in its four and five-beat lines, lines that do not quite conform to

iambic tetrameter or pentameter, but which give the impression of

structured thought and emotion. From first to last, the imagery and

diction of this poem are interesting, fresh, and carefully related to the

theme: the horror of automobile accidents and the philosophical

67



questions raised by such occurrences. For example, in the opening lines, the poet develops a powerful metaphor of the ambulance approaching an automobile accident. The ambulance is compared at once to a heart

beat (line 1), an artery (line 3), and a death angel (lines 4, 5, and 6). There is no confusion in the connection between these images, and the

realistic description in the first stanza is fresh and appropriate. In lines

20 and 21, the comparison of the wrecks to locust husks is, to me, more powerful than McKuen's sandwich simile. Shapiro's metaphor invites exploration, and one can find interesting resemblances between

locust husks and auto wrecks: both are dead shells that once contained

life; both are cyclic, the latter ironically so; both cling, perhaps

grotesquely and forlornly, for support. The entire poem is filled with interesting figurative language that

is capable of close analysis, but for the sake of time 1 shall move on

quickly. Stanza four sustains the imagery of the hospital, and leads to

the final stanza with its philosophical questions about the meaning of

accidents. Death is explainable when it takes place in war, in birth, or

by suicide or cancer. But an automobile accident is more mysterious because the causes (particularly for the innocent) are more complex and mystifying. Is one's "time up"? Are these incidents accomplished

by Divine Decree? Are they merely "accidents"? Shapiro's poem raises

questions about more fundamental issues than does McKuen's poem.

Shapiro moves steadily toward the universal; McKuen remains with the

local. And though the test of a poem's superiority cannot necessarily

depend upon its universality, such an index is seldom unreliable. In this

case, Mr. Shapiro has a clear-cut victory. I would lirce to conclude this discussion by citing a marvelously

frivolous free verse poem by a writer admired and condemned by many

people of our time — Mr. Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

DON'T LET THAT HORSE

Don't let that horse eat that violin

cried Chagall's mother But he

kept right on

painting And became famous

And kept on painting The Horse With Violin In Mouth

And when he finally finished it he jumped upon the horse

and rode away waving the violin

And then with a low bow gave it to the first naked nude he ran across

And there were no strings attached

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I think it is well occasionally to put such poems before our

students to prove to them that we can appreciate light, humorous verse.

The therapeutic effect of the grin and the guffaw cannot be

overestimated. Enjoy, then, Mr. Ferlinghetti's little satire of the strange titles and surrealistic images of modern painting. The marvelous

redundancy "naked nude" is surpassed only by the pun of the final

line. If we cannot teach our students the value and relevance of poetic

form, perhaps we can cultivate in them a humorous intelligence, an

intelligence that recognizes the omnipresence of the laughable, the

ludicrous, and the absurd in life and in human behavior. Perhaps then

our revolutionaries will not take themselves so solemnly, but will

become aware of the humor implicit in some of their actions and

formulations. If this were our only contribution to the Revolution, I

would not be ashamed of our efforts.

William Osborne

Chairman, Department of English

Memphis State University

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poetry and relevance

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