Over the past week I've been reading a lot of poems. I just felt like I was getting a bit sick of, well, the kind of numbing, academic, descriptive sentences which I am confronted with constantly in my readings. Even a fictional novel, no matter how avant-garde, seemed insufficient. I wanted poetry - a world that I had dabbled in for a bit in middle school, and have since more or less abandoned.
For me, Poetry is, when you come down to it, the most precise and elegant form the english language can take. With nothing more than words and paper, writers can manipulate spacing, lines, even font for dramatic effect, but it really all comes down to words - everything hinges on the ability of these jumbles of letters to convey feelings that, suprisingly, large analytical paragraphs and sentances simply cannot. It is a high-wire act that must be flawless from beginning to and, where a single slip-up in word choice or placement can take away from the message.
You can read a poem once and get something out of it, but today I tried to memorize a few of my favorite works from Lawrence Ferlingetthi's 1959 work Coney Island of the Mind. It has a bit of the gritty, no-nonsense flavor of Charles Bukowski, but marries it with the beatific stylings of Allen Ginsburg.
Memorizing a poem is almost a dangerous act - by ingraining each stanza into your mind, you start to turn over each word, uncover all the possible meanings in your quest to find the "angle" that will stick the poem in your head. A line that seemed innocuous at first can, when this process becomes underway, reveal itself as rather disturbing. Nonetheless, the benefits outway (of course) some of the more psychological drawbacks. By memorizing something line by line, then stanza by stanza, and finally in its entirety, you percieve the hidden, internal relationships (whether by theme, rhyme, or some other connection) between words and phrases. If you've done it right, by the time you are done the poem has become a story, a complete and complex world unto itself. Secondly, because you have memorized the poem in the way best suited for YOU, once you deliver the poem it becomes your own - the cadences, what you stress and de-stress - it becomes a kind of Verbal Jazz in your hands where you have a set body of notes (words), but what you do with them is up to you. In about 10 or 15 minutes you have gone from suffering under a poem to becoming its master, taking it to places only you have envisioned.
I'll come back to this subject later, but here is a clip of Lawrence himself reading from a large swath of his poetry. The goodness begins at 5:30