Wrap Up National Poetry Month By Eating A Poem

Don't be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice
That may run down your chin.

Those are the opening lines of Eve Merriam's "How to Eat a Poem," a work I first heard and read in seventh grade English class and have loved ever since.

I love poetry and I love that invitation. I wish more people knew that poetry was just that accessible: something you can reach right out and eat.

Our community is just completing a month of noontime poetry readings hosted by Beehive Books, our locally owned, independent bookstore in our downtown. Anyone could sign up to read. It was the reader's choice what to read, and why. Most readers picked one poet only; my friend Margo just read Billy Collins last Thursday and had us all laughing. (How can you not laugh when someone is reading Billy Collins?)

I read the day before. Poetry gourmand that I am, I could not limit myself to just one poet, so I started off with Merriam's poem and took it from there. E. B. White, e e cummings, Gary Larson - I read them all and more.

It is not coincidental that April is both National Poetry Month and Jazz Appreciation Month. To me, poetry and jazz are two of the most misunderstood art forms. Many people go out of their way to avoid one or both of them because they're afraid. It's too deep, it's too hard, it's too unapproachable. People hear a poem like "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens and start grumbling. "What is he talking about?" "What do twenty snowy mountains have to do with a blackbird?" The disgruntled listener then throws up his hands and stalks away, muttering words like "boring" and "incomprehensible."

But poetry is so many things. It's a song, it's a chant, it's a nursery rhyme. Nursery rhymes were my first poems, and they were the first poems my children learned as well.

Deedle deedle dumpling, my son John,
Went to bed with his stockings on.
One shoe off and one shoe on,
Deedle deedle dumpling, my son John.

Poetry takes many structures, from the simple to the complex, and many rhythms, including none at all. It is not limited to the young or the mature, either in appreciating it or in writing it. Many of us labored long and hard throughout our younger years writing poem after poem.

I feel embarrassed
(trying to find the chain
of my necklace)
that he should see me fumbling about my neck
like an old woman:
it could have been a lace-
edged handkerchief
or unfastened cameo brooch
on a vast expanse of dotted swiss bosom.

I should be dressed in slender silks and feathers:
not mind-printed into a dowagered old age.

I have it on good authority that the author of that work, if she had to do over, would choose a different phrase than "mind-printed."

Originally, I was going to read Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in a point-counterpoint between Ariel and Birthday Letters. I got sidetracked because in looking for a certain humorous poem by E. B. White, "I Paint What I See," I rediscovered other poems of a different bent and so felt compelled to read a lot of White instead. And that's the beauty of poetry too: you can return to a poem or a poet time and time again and see and hear new things. (Read White's "Soliloquy at Times Square" and see what I mean.)

Poetry has been greatly reduced and in some cases stripped out of the school curriculum around here, in large part, I suspect, because it is too soft a topic. The powers-that-be at the state and national levels who call for more rigorous standards cannot squeeze the round peg of poetry into the square opening of what they feel our children "need" to be competitive in the world. As curriculum demands get cinched tighter and tighter, poetry, like art and music, often goes out the door. In our rush to measure the merit of a school or a teacher by standardized test numbers, we increasing echo Gradgrind, the notorious teacher in Hard Times, who announced "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life."

And poetry, like art and music, is never about the Facts. About Life, yes, but not about the Facts.

Poet Mary Oliver wrote that "poems are not words after all, but fires for the cold, ropes to be let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry." Sometimes I worry that we are all increasingly hungry.

Fortunately, the feast is right at hand. The poems are waiting, ripe, warm, inviting.

Pick one up and bite in.