Poetry Ambush

I had a flashback to my old way of thinking, recently, when I bought a novel called The Marlowe Papers. I expected a fictionalized version of a Shakespeare theory—a version in which Christopher Marlowe wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare. What I found, when I opened my e-book, was an entire 400-some-odd pages of a novel written in iambic pentameter. Say what?!

Now, the truth is that if it weren’t divided up into those ten-syllable lines, I wouldn’t know it was written in that meter. I never would have picked it up in a million years, because no one expects a whole book to be written in verse, these days. Oh, true, I’d had to study some of the old classics—like Dante’s Inferno—which actually are book-length poems, so I suppose it shouldn’t feel like such an impossible program. Of course, the study of such monsters is probably where my dislike of poetry came from. Maybe?

I think a lot of my dislike had to do with impatience. Impatience with things being hinted that could have been said, Impatience with the need (I thought) for end-rhymes, and stuffing the words into that precise sort of meter, often leaving a sentence sounding stilted and mangled. Every time I saw a poem, I let my eyes skip right over it—I wouldn’t even read them. (An attitude which didn’t do me any favors in my literature classes, in those units where we were supposed to be studying those poems…) I just didn’t have the patience for anything broken into those short little lines of a poem.

And then I got side-swiped. My American Lit professor sometimes gave us reading assignments that weren’t in our anthology, so on one rainy Friday afternoon, he handed out a photocopied packet, with a photocopied daguerrotype on the front page, showing a guy with startlingly light eyes and a neatly trimmed beard, with a flat-topped hat at a jaunty angle on his head.

I absolutely fell in love, and I was dying to know who this poet was—our photocopied packet didn’t have his name anywhere. Google wasn’t a Thing, yet, and I had no one to ask, so the question (and the poetry!) haunted me all weekend like an obsession. He wrote of sex, and love, and travel, and the ocean, and reading, and a young America—one thing after another tugging at me, resonating with me. I read and re-read the photocopied poems, and hoped there was more.

I didn’t know poetry could look like this! The long lines, the rhythm freed from restrictions, the words freed from that random necessity to rhyme at the ends. I didn’t just want to READ more of this (although I did want that)—I wanted to DO this. If poetry could be shaped like this, I wanted to play with it.

It happened to be time to enroll in the next semester’s courses, and I jumped on the chance to take an introductory-level poetry-writing class. If you had told me, a week earlier, that I was about to do this, I would have laughed my ass off. I was a Zoology major, for crying out loud—only taking the literature course as a general-education requirement. Creative writing wouldn’t fill any requirement for my degree.

But following that weekend-of-Whitman, semester by semester, I found excuses to take another writing course, and another one. It didn’t cost me anything extra, I told myself—I already paid the set tuition for a semester, so an added class was essentially a freebie. I needed a break from all the heavy lab-work, I told myself—something lighter between all the chem classes.

When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d with plaudits in the capital, still it was not a happy night for me that follow’d.

And else when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d, still I was not happy.

But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,

When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,

When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,

And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy,

O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well,

And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening came my friend,

And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,

I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me whispering to congratulate me,

For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,

In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,

And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.

~ Walt Whitman