Reclaiming Poetry

Is not as easy at it sounds. For one, there's all that reading to do. Kidding. I'll paraphrase Northrop Frye here and talk about the difference between the reader and the critic. The reader has a host of favorite pieces of literature he likes for various reasons, they resonate on some level. The critic concerns himself with literature like a scientist. I assume this means going about the business of organizing the canon into some sort of coherent shape, making distinctions based on impersonal analysis. What Eliot might call "taking in the tradition." I'm struggling here and I might need someone to throw me a life preserver. Sometime last year I made the firm decision to dive back into poetry, having dabbled for some time awaiting acceptance into one program or other, and writing an unfinished novel. Inspired by Christian Wiman's "Ambition and Survival" I read up on different critics first. This serves two purposes: first, to get the topography of poetry. This is either explicitly stated or implied by poet-critics left and right. You learn Bishop was friends with Lowell. You learn Lowell had issues. You learn Denise Levertov chooses Williams over Eliot. You learn Pound had issues. You learn Derek Walcott writes damn fine essays. You learn Yeats was a freak, but a fascinating one. You learn about the 20th century straw man called "free verse" everyone has strong opinions about. I read criticism from Levertov, Di Piero, Pound, Heaney, CK Williams. I read Lowell, Frost, Auden, Milton, 20th century collections. Like the magic eye, some of the picture is beginning to fill in. I recently picked up a collection of Joseph Brodsky, looked back into Milozs, expanding beyond the American voice. And yet, few of the poems I've read stick with me as transformative experiences. Admittedly, I read quickly, and haven't made a ton of space for close examination, for depth. Among the poetry I've read this year, a few poems from the magazine Poetry stick out to me. This is due, in part, to the range of quality and voice, so decent poems stick out. But while I felt I was supposed to enjoy Auden, wanted to enjoy Pound, for tone and voice, for calculated flippancy, I connected with the poems of Phillip Larkin. For subtlety of gesture, for sensitivity to family and the confusion of displacement and a kind of humble grandiosity I enjoyed Li-Young Lee. For their unapologetically masculine timbres, I enjoyed Ted Hughes and William Logan, respectively. I did not analyze any of the poems here, so I'm not speaking, as perhaps I ought, of style or form, but of the overall impact of the poem, with content perhaps foregrounded. This probably says more about me than about some abstracted "problem with poetry," and bears some reflection, but I thought it interesting that after roughly a year, I feel like life is too short to spend a great deal of it "familiarizing oneself with the canon" or some such. What punches you in the stomach? Worry about the whys and wherefores later. Read that. Don't flinch.