News that Stays News

Well, lo and behold, you have read your last poem for this course. I think back to some of your responses, when, on the first day of class, I asked you to describe your relationship with poetry in one word: "conflicted," "frenemies," "50/50," "budding," "unexercised," "rollercoaster," "appreciative," "theoretical," "strained," "complicated," et al. Anyway, I hope many of you saw the relationship improve, and that you found the poetry we read and discussed increasingly enjoyable. I'm always interested in writers who can describe the virtues of reading poetry, in part because some of us often need to be reminded of its value. Wordsworth, Shelley, and Arnold have done it in their various "manifestos," but I recently came upon a contemporary version. Here are some snippets from an essay by Jane Hirschfield -- "Poetry and the Constellation of Surprise" -- that tell us how poetry can enrich our lives if we open ourselves up to it, read it regularly, listen to its music, seek out its insights and meanings, etc.:

"Each instant of a good poem provides the enactment of an unfathomable transformation. From the silence preceding the title's first word to that first word, from the first word to the second, everything is changed. The illimitable possibility of the empty page becomes some constellation of feeling, thought, interior shift, and musical gesture: the many-leveled experience we feel as 'meaning.' A good poem makes self and world knowable in new ways, brings us into an existence opened, augmented, and altered. Part of its work, then, must also be to surprise -- to awaken into a new circumference is to be startled.

"Poems transport us into unanticipatable comprehensions. In this, lyric epiphany is like any learning sharply won: its surprise is the signal of strongly shifted knowledge. But one of the distinguishing powers of art is that it unseals its experience freshly not only once, but many times. Good poems provide an informing so simultaneously necessary and elusive that they are never, it seems, taken in fully, and can never be fully used up. New each time they are read, good poems offer a kind of mirror-reflection of Tantalus's Hell -- each time we enter poetry's realm, we find hunger both wholly present and wholly answered....

"It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self. Having read it, we are not who we were the moment before.... Art lives in what it awakens in us.... Through a good poem's eyes we see the world liberated from what we would have it do. Existence does not guarantee us destination, nor trust, nor equity, nor one moment beyond this instant's almost weightless duration. It is a triteness to say that the only thing to be counted upon is that what you count on will not be what comes. Utilitarian truths evaporate: we die. Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy."

I love that last sentence about poetry helping us bear the "tally and toll of our transience" and directing us to joy, but if you want a one-line substitute for all of this, how about this nugget from Ezra Pound: "Poetry is news that stays news." I hope each of you manage to store away at least a few poems after this term, and that you will thereby find some news that stays news in your lives. Maybe we can even keep a tally of them here (if you'd be inclined to share which one(s) work for you at this level, and how) -- or, when you finish your "awards paper," maybe you'd even be inclined to post a portion of your "most outstanding poem of the semester" write-up, or at least the poem you chose and a sentence or two explaining why.