Howdy friends,

For the last little bit in ASTU we have been exploring poetry and the politics surrounding it. Poetry is something that I have priorities in my life and am very enthusiastic about (if you couldn’t tell by the “whoohooo”). I am actually currently in the (very long) process of putting together a composition of my own poetry. In University (especially UBC) I think that poetry is very underestimated in its complexities structure and importance in history. This isn’t one particular persons or faculties fault, but it seems like unless you are studying creative writing poetry and all of the amazing things that it can do gets forgotten. I also understand that poetry just like performance art or calculous, is just not some peoples cup O’tea.

I would like to take this little moment of time to remind everyone that even though we (university students and faculty) seem to spend day in and day out reading very complex and groundbreaking (but sometimes dry) writings by big historical and academic names, poetry also has the ability to be very intercute, revolutionary and influential.  

Often when I hear my fellow students talking about poetry there two main themes that I gather, one being that they generally don’t like it or understand what’s it’s saying and two that they feel it amounts to the overall importance in life that the other readings in our curriculum do. I too occasionally catch myself prioritising other styles of assigned literature over the assigned poetry. Some of this frustration or resentment towards poetry i believe comes from how as students we are taught to process literature. It has become an absolute necessity for success in a university to be able to not only to be able to make it to the end of a complex study or argumentative work, but to also be able to break down its pieces and see how one thing leads to the next and what it means in terms of the real world. We have been seasoned and prepped for understanding this academic style of writing our whole life. Mostly this comes from our societies prioritization of S.T.E.M, governmental and corporate related occupations and the idea that choosing to create and produce art as a career generally does not lead to a financially stable life (i.e. the starving artist).The the idea that the production of art is a serious and societally important career has only recently started to become accepted, and even more recently the importance of incorporating art into the education system has come about.

Based off of the way that our education systems function and how our culture views artists, when we think of pieces of writing that have shaped the functionality of humanity we think of things like government documents and scientific findings. Instead of Shakespeare’s Hamlet  or Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The themes from these three pieces of poetry and the contributions from these two poets alone are so embedded in our culture that often people do not even recognize them when they are present. One example of their influences would be that Shakespeare on his own added over 1700 words to the english language, words so common as bedroom, lonely, eyeball, elbow and lower that when people learn these words came from poems they are in disbelief. A fun game is trying to think of the different consumer products that are named after things in Homer’s epic poetry, for starters we have Amazon and the honda Odyssey.

Along with poetries contributions to the shaping of humanity another thing that is overlooked is its level of complexes structuring and the intellectual engagement it requires to fully comprehend. I don’t know about you, but without in depth lecturing and full class discussions the Odyssey was a very confusing and antagonising read.

In university when we think of what poetry is I believe most of us think about lyrical poetry. This makes sense since it has been very popular over the last century. The issue with only thinking about lyrical poetry is that it’s very easy to read and not realize all of the rules and layering that goes into it. For example when reading Florence Cassen Mayers All-American Sestina one could initially gather that it’s just a bunch of counting and naming of typical american things:

One nation, indivisible

two-car garage

three strikes you’re out

four-minute mile

five-cent cigar

six-string guitar

 

six-pack Bud

one-day sale

five-year warranty

two-way street

fourscore and seven years ago

three cheers

 

three-star restaurant

sixty-

four-dollar question

one-night stand

two-pound lobster

five-star general

 

five-course meal

three sheets to the wind

two bits

six-shooter

one-armed bandit

Four-poster

 

four-wheel drive

five-and-dime

hole in one

three-alarm fire

sweet sixteen

Two-wheeler

 

two-tone Chevy

four rms, hi flr, w/vu

six-footer

high five

three-ring circus

one-room schoolhouse

 

two thumbs up, five-karat diamond

Fourth of July, three-piece suit

six feet under, one-horse town

When really the form of the piece, sestina, is very complex. It always has 39 lines and follows a strict syllabic structure and repetitive pattern. Before being able to decode a poem one also has to learn the language that explains it and the ability to read poetic patterns, in a way understanding these two things is similar to understanding how to read music. Poets.org explains the formula for the sestina writing,

“repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi[…] the envoi must also include the remaining three end-words, BDF, in the course of the three lines so that all six recurring words appear in the final three lines.”   

The formaic outline is blow:

1. ABCDEF
2. FAEBDC
3. CFDABE
4. ECBFAD
5. DEACFB
6. BDFECA
7. (envoi) ECA or ACE

Even more complex than the Sestina are the works of idiosyncratic poets like E.E Cumming who’s writing broke new ground and showed the world that the spacing and selection of words in writing holds incredible power over its audience. This can also be seen (in a bit different way) in Julián Felipe Herrera’s You throw a stone where the lay out of the words forces the reader to internalize the poem in a similar motion as the actions taking place in the work.  Below are two of my favorite E. E. Cummings poems, the first one I WILL BE is an example of how the spacing of the letters influences how the reader experiences the poem. Every time is one reading this they are analyzing chaos, hopping, dividing and deeply focusing on what the words are trying to say literally and spaciously. The second piece, 9, uses words in an interruptive style to represent underlying meaning. What words are read and what ones are not is part of the function of the work showing the power of choice that the poem contains, forcing its readers to make decisions and eliminations before they are able to get the full meaning of the work.

9.

there are so many tictoc
clocks everywhere telling people
what toctic time it is for
tictic instance five toc minutes toc
past six tic

Spring is not regulated and does
not get out of order nor do
its hands a little jerking move
over numbers slowly

we do not
wind it up it has no weights
springs wheels inside of
its slender self no indeed dear
nothing of the kind.

(So,when kiss Spring comes
we’ll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
lips because tic clocks toc don’t make
a toctic difference
to kisskiss you and to
kiss me)

All four of the poems I’ve mentioned above are fairly easy to skim over and kind of guess or assume what they are trying to tell you. I fear that due to the fast pace of university and the high focus on academic and scholarly writing students, like myself, are forgetting about all the incredible ways that poetry works with its readers. For myself this is very upsetting to realize how long it’s been since i sat down and really decoded something other than an assigned piece of work. Even though the poetry that we have been looking at in our ASTU class was assigned it has been a very important wake up call. Sitting down and analyzing poetry over the last week or so has made me recognize in myself and others how little we think about poetry and all that it does.