In Defence of Poetry
As a culture, we have lost touch with our poetical selves. I believe that when this happens, we become dissociated, estranged, and detached from our true selves, both as individuals and as a culture. There were times in the past when we were in touch with our poetical selves. In the 1850s, Alfred Lord Tennyson sold 50,000 copies of volumes of his poetry. In the days of Samuel Johnson, people would read poetry in chapbooks and broadsheets distributed in coffee houses. In the time of Shakespeare and the Cavalier Poets, people read poetry on a regular basis. Old English poems such as the Beowulf Epic were meant to be read out loud in mead halls (ie., bars) and revellers would bang their beer mugs to accent the alliterations which occurred in virtually every line.
Today poets are marginalized to publications read only by a few people, or to websites such as this one. I believe that is sad. I agree with William Carlos Williams, who wrote “it is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”
When we tell jokes; or tell stories; or when rappers rap; when we make a good speech: these are the beginnings of poetry. I would encourage all my readers to read poetry.
My favorite poet of all time is John Donne, my favorite modern poets Seamus Heaney and Ezra Pound. When I was growing up in Burnaby, I had no opportunity to enjoy poetry; it was not something that my peer group encouraged. I did not realize I loved poetry until I grew up and left. My first introduction to poetry was the rhymed couplets of Alexander Pope. They are beautiful in their own way, but ultimately limiting as a mode of expression. I also loved the romantic poetry of John Keats.
You will notice that most of my poetry does not rhyme. “Is not poetry supposed to rhyme?” you may ask. Of all of the surviving canon of good English poetry from the time of the Beowulf Epic up to the present time, the majority of poetry does not rhyme. Yet all good poems contain their own laws of diction: where the stresses fall, whether the lines end at the conclusion of a thought, or whether the thought continues to the next line, are important in good poems. You may not fully understand the poem in the first two readings, but you will say, “Yes, that works.”
Having written the above, I still find working in various forms, such as the iambic pentameter couplet, the sonnet and the villanelle, challenging. I believe that good poets should be able to work in all types of poems. I hope you enjoy my poem “Villanelle”, which I have included as a sample of my rhymed work.
Some of the best poems are obscure in their meanings. The great poet T.S. Eliot stated that the “meaning” of the poem is like the meat that the house burglar brings for the family watchdog. The burglar feeds the dog the meat so the burglar can do his work in and around the house. The poet feeds the “meaning” of the poem to the reader so that the poem can do its real work in and around the mind and senses of the reader.
The lines of Byron, for example: “she walks in beauty like the night/of cloudless climes and starry skies/and all that’s best of dark and night/meet in her aspect and in her eyes.” Can you tell me what that means? I cannot read these lines aloud without tearing up. And yet, I am not certain I can plumb the depths of Byron’s meaning crammed into these four brief lines. Anyway, is not it more fun just reading the lines, rather than trying to figure what they mean?
All of which is to say, I hope you have enjoyed my poetry, and I hope you will use these words as your inspiration to discover beautiful poems that you may find.
Lyle Harris
Villanelle
This scent, you process through your brain:
Lilac’s fragrance after showers
God, the Architect, has surprised you again
The winds whispers through the rain:
“I am prisoner of my hours.”
(This thought you process through your brain)
Lilac, bee-balm, sage, wolf’s bane:
The post-rain fragrance of these flowers
God, the Architect, has surprised you again.
The lilac’s sweetness after rain
Drifts through the windows of high towers
This scent you process through your brain
Your self-sufficiency is vain
Youth vanishes, joy of living sours
–God the Architect, has surprised you again!–
And vanishes. But memories remain,
Vibrant thoughts of faded powers
And the scent you process through your brain.
God the Architect has surprised you again.
Bishop’s Pond (Reflections) By David Milne
how the unseen visions of imagination
beggar pale reality:
how, for instance, Jacob’s vision of angels
climbing up and down the ladder
survived his awakening in the cold desert dawn
with his head resting on a cold flat stone:
how the sweet memory of the first kiss
always survives the awkward real-life fumbling, colliding
bumping of noses, lips and teeth:
and so it is with Bishop’s Pond (Reflections)
where the emaciated sky,
the snowy trees, and frozen tree-fall
are sketched in blandest beige
and their reflections in lush strokes of green, red, purple
as if: air were a pale reflection of water
as if: sunlight sprang from the ocean’s depth
as if: a drowning person sprouted gills and fins
and burst into life
I-Phone Photographs
the touch of my finger compresses the scene
from three dimensions to two:
grasses and trees withdraw
to a similitude of trees and grasses
a mountain shrivels
to a coniform projection
a cloud devolves
to a splash of white
in the foreground, an amorphous cap, in shades of brown,
and just below the cap, your face in the semblance of a smile,
the hand upheld postulates
a goodbye wave:
this likeness withdraws life
as an outgoing tide leaves an ambiguous line
where the water might have been
my finger tracks across the screen
and disambiguates the sequence
by consigning poorly formed or
duplicate images to “Trash”
reconstituting life into a controlled sequence
in any way the editor chooses:
fast-forward
slo-mo
or reverse
more cunningly skillfully than could have been imagined
by the creators of The Jazz Singer
or Steamboat Willie
real life? or a casting call?
will the chimerical next version
ascend via artificial intelligence into real time and
crop the circles from my eyes?
delete my second wife?
or fast-reverse and freeze-frame
to the moment before this moment
when I kissed you
for the last time?
Umbrella Moves
I held the umbrella, you gave the cue:
“how would Fred and Ginger will handle this?”
“simple” – I said, and took your elbow:
singing in the rain
just singing in…”
“what a glorious feeling I’m….”
“that was Gene Kelly…” you said, trying to free your boot-heel from a grate
“typical me, never the right line for the right place”
as I steadied you – Astaire-like, or Kelly-like, whatever
– and steered us around the grate and up the step
our first drink on our first date
–outside under rain-proof cover and heat-lamp –
we could see Victoria’s Harbor lights
– you ordered oysters as hors d’oevres
the rain dripped through the plastic
onto the front of your dress
redefining your outline for my imagination
you feigned embarrassment
and said: “I heard that oysters are aphrodisiac”
as I – trembling at the thought – spilled cocktail sauce on my shirt
“are you inviting me back for a drink?”
being older now, I am sorry to say,
only the first oyster worked.
but I look forward to our next practice
of our new umbrella moves
Blackberries
the ones at
eye level
picked or unripe
the low ones
where animals sniffed and pee’d
you leave untouched
a few higher ones
you rake down
with a found stick
but the most fecund
the biggest clustered deep purple
teasingly out of reach…
you set your feet
bend your knees
coil for the vertical
jump and ouch! a finger
withdraws from a pierce
by a hidden thorn
the bud of blood
grows ripens falls
a blackberry coloured rivulet
and with less drama than
Adam expelled from the garden
you slink off
thumb pressure on lanced finger:
the price of sweetness
out of reach
paid again in blood
Dr. Google I am Searching
Dr. Google I am searching for an answer to the following questions:
first: how does a Russian dictator get to trample upon an innocent eastern
European population?
and: how can a good God allow the corona virus to continue?
do these problems exist because of Adam and Eve?
or did He in His infinite wisdom believe there are too many people, and some
populations needed thinning out?
was He possibly busy creating something in another galaxy, and
momentarily distracted?
or did He just want us to put a microscope on the human condition
and get everybody thinking about Him?
Your search – “Was He possibly busy creating something”—did not match any
documents; make sure that all words are spelled correctly
And Dr. Google I am searching for an answer to how far
will the
universe continue to expand
and what will happen to us when the process finishes
and whether the expansion will be truly hastened by dark energy,
and whether during the expansion process our universe
will bump up against another universe,
and if so whether it will contract again,
and if and when the universe finally winds down,
will it choke on a massive meal of stardust, and
will we all vanish into one huge black hole that has
yet to be discovered?
“Black Holes: A Space Discovery Guide” books.google.ca
Dr. Google I am searching for an answer on how to pray,
whether on my knees or standing up
with eyes open or eyes closed
or whether with hands clasped or raised hands
and whether those people who Praise the Lord
in public worship with arms outstretched
are mostly sincere
or going just a little over the top?
and whether I should believe in angels,
and if so, how many of them can fit on the head of a pin
“No results found. Search instead angels/ head/ pin”
Dr. Google I am searching for a balance
between truth and love
between loving the person and hating the act,
and how to effectively protest the inherent unfairness of the human condition
and I am searching for a better answer for my children about “why did Grandpa
die?”
than: “he is gone to be with Grandma.”
and I am searching for the best time to tell your children there is no Santa Claus
Dr. Google I am searching for the answer concerning whether a million termites
eating through however many blocks of wood
could carve out a Chippendale,
or whether strafing machine guns tearing through the walls of Ukranian barns
could ever outline an image of a cow or pig?
or whether a thousand pigeons
pooping on Lord Nelson’s statue for however-many years
could poop out a copy of Michaelango’s “David”
or whether a number of robins chirping for a
comparable number of years could ever chirp out
the notes of “Moonlight Sonata”
or whether a windstorm could ever blow into a junkyard and assemble
a perfectly functioning Airbus A380
“No results found. Search instead Airbus 380 /assemble/ junkyard”
Dr. Google I am searching
for an answer for why I feel like a submarine
drifting undersea
without a periscope
and Dr. Google, I am searching for an answer as to how many times can we say: “this
evil is unacceptable”
before the evil becomes acceptable?
And how many times the recorded voice:
“we are experiencing an unusually high volume of calls”
before it becomes a usual volume of calls?
Dr. Google I am searching for a better world
where people will do unto others as they would have others do unto themselves
or if that proves impossible then for a world
where at least we can be kind to each other
where nuclear weapons will be thrown into the sea, but not before governments
figure out how to contain Technetium-99 which has a half-life of 211,000 years
and I am searching for a time when all the fish in the sea
can swim on with their lives without consuming plastic
and when baseball teams and politicians don’t use electronic
means to steal signs and votes
in summary Dr. Google
what I am searching for is the Meaning of Life and why we are in
the condition we are in.
See” The Meaning of Life” by Donald Hopper, Harper Collins $44.95
And “The Condition We Are In” by Dr. Raymond Sousa, Simon and
Schuster (paperback only) $19.99”
The Government Warf at Prince Rupert
I
the silence of the lapping waves
and bobbing lures
broken by the sounds of the reeling-in of spinning rods
and—occasionally—fish flung up onto the dock
flapping, almost crawling along the ship-lap
their heaving silenced by slapping them against the posts
and then—quickly—deadheading them
the stench of rotting fishheads
the savor of salt-water
the confluence of fetid and fecund
always with me
II
I “helped” by holding the worms
barely alive and wriggling
my hand within father’s larger hand
as he skewered the worms on the hook
I used the intervals between casts
to hopscotch down the dock
dodging backcasts, fishhooks, flies
bait-buckets and loose boards
as father fished for rock-fish,
halibut, and feral Atlantic salmon
escaped from pens at sea
III
the stench of the fishheads
like the stink of skunk-cabbage
in the boggy Prince Rupert woodlands
as father and I searched for wild fox-glove,
wild gaultheria
free for the gathering and taking
for the only garden he could afford
IV
the garden where
I dug for worms which I plucked
bruised and torn by 5-year-old hands
to place in my special earth-worm paper cup
as I waited for him to take me to the dock
V
one of the fishers hooked an eel
–serpent invader from the underworld—
several tried to hold it
but it escaped, its serpent tail slapping the ship-lap –
it slithered in my direction
and I screamed and ran
its jagged teeth flashing as it tried to disgorge the hook
VI
from the wharf to the RCMP station
where we took Gerry, our Labrador puppy,
for mercy killing after he
swallowed a fishhook
when suddenly the yelping stopped
(“—I don’t understand—could the puppy
digest the hook?”)
and the large uniformed RCMP constable who
tried to staunch my tears that kept flowing
unable to process
that my dog who had died
was now alive again
Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky
Painting, by Emily Carr
tall gangly tree
whose crown digs into the ribs of the clouds
and holds up the sky
anorexia saved you from the loggers’ hands
now all the soil’s nutrients belong to you
a question: did you grow up gradually?
or did you quickly bean-pole up
to avoid the clear-cut screams
of friends being chopped below?
the tree that the builders rejected
has become the pillar
that holds up the sky
and is marvelous in our eyes
Different
Most of us make ‘angel’
when we pass from death to life—
but still
I’m different from the others–
waving palm branches
harp practice sharp at five every Wednesday
comparing wingspan with the seraphim
vapourizing and fooling our friends
by coalescing in surprising places–
I’m not saying boring
just an awful lot of
enharmonic similitude
left me with a romantic readiness
to descend back to time space and flesh
no rule against it
no Divine decree
(who would want to walk away from Heaven?)
Anyway I flew the coup
crossed back to see you
I knew just where to go
your second floor outdoor garden
the common property of your condo
your back bowed, shoulders slumped
head in your hands
covering your eyes so
no mortal could see you cry
how I wanted to hold you
in my eternal arms
grow lungs
sprout vocal chords
generate hands to catch
the tears that hit the ground like
your errant baseball throws
in our early games of catch
and whisper
your boyhood name:
Lyle-ee Boy.
good news!
There’s no crying in Heaven.
And Someday
will wipe
every tear
from your eyes
Ripping Off the Bandage
The bandage had been left on the wound too long,
and ooze had permeated the fabric of the tape,
congealed and caked
like hardened gyproc mud.
The first few loops, the bandage came off easily
but the part that touched skin would not be budged.
I closed my eyes, ripped hard,
and as I screamed,
the bandage came off,
tearing away great gouges of skin.
Not a clean tear.
The burning pain has not abated, and the application
of pressure through several tissue papers
has not stopped the bleeding.
Joel at Fifteen
every evening he practised
in the floodlit schoolyard –
I watched him mark a circle
with cones, then dribble
in-out, in-out, in perfect control
and flash a shot at an imaginary net
“schoolwork done” there’s no
money in soccer, you know’ –
but his eyes flashed
as he turned his back
and began again the
boom, boom, boom
of ball against foundation wall – and I knew he had been
to school all week
Joel at fifteen seemed deep beyond years
as he flicked the ball up
and spun it perfectly
and his face glowed as if he knew
a better world must exist somewhere,
spinning perfectly
in games, he scored it will
with his favourite shot,
a full-turn arced like a rainbow into an upper corner –
and the ball seemed to freeze in stop-action
before diving into the net
as Joel posed with his head down
like extended and follow-3
degree in smile that seemed to say:
“this is my moment,
everything depends on this”
and at the end of the game when the whistle blew
he bit back the tears
because the game was over
and he could play no more that day
Your Diagnosis
for K.D.
“I feel sick” said Toshi
and gush! the whole gym floor explodes in barf
“the janitor must have a bucket and mop”
and as water from the screeching tap
drums and rattles onto old galvanize
you say: “there’s no coach’s manual for this, is there?”
and no coach’s manual, either, for your diagnosis
no dress-rehearsal to practice pain in small doses
no dry-run for your last 911
no walk-through for your last dim recognition
of grieving faces with eyes trying
to stay dry
if only there was a coach’s manual for this
THIS
If we could only
look up what to do
in a few pages
of a chapter
in a book somewhere
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