Features

Good books, old friends

Details

By Kara Kvasnicka

Tuesday, November 29, -0001

Hits: 368

Occasionally, I do buy a particular volume he expresses an interest in. However, I usually just request it through interlibrary loan because I know nobody other than him would check it out.

I have no problem getting the kids to take home Jack Prelutsky's latest rhymes, but the only recent purchase in verse intended for grown-ups I have made without any hesitation is Garrison Keillor's Good Poems (Viking, 2002, $25.95).

My skin actually tingled with excitement when a release date was given to this anthology of poems, all originally aired on Keillor's daily five-minute radio program "The Writer's Almanac."

Surely, I thought, if anyone can lead us into a thoughtful reconsideration of a sadly neglected genre, it is this beloved heartland humorist. His rich, sonorous voice is the perfect instrument for reciting the lyrical musings of, say, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes or Donald Hall.

Keillor, most of you know, is the legendary host of "A Prairie Home Companion," the only weekly variety show on radio of which I am aware. In addition, he has penned nine books. If he cannot convince us the poem is still relevant, who can?

Former English major that I am, I have my own, albeit hardly profound, theories as to why even the most serious readers avoid poetry like the plague.

Simply put, we lead busy lives and crave literature that speaks to us with directness and immediacy. Right or wrong, we do not think of poems, as we do novels, as possessing those qualities.

We only remember being introduced to them in high school and college, long before we could lay claim to the experiences that would enable us to cut through, to their bare essence, the intricate threads of word and syllable in which they are woven.

At that point in our relatively new existences, we are too naive, ripe for the picking, to differentiate between sincerely applied craft and con artistry.

True, as Keillor points out in an introduction that is as finely and carefully wrought as the most beautiful rhyming couplet, there is no shortage of poems with strong, narrative lines that are easy to follow.

But foremost in our memories are the abstract riddles we were required to interpret for letter grades, not to mention all the anguished hours we spent doing so.

By including in his collection only poetry that makes sense to us in the context of our daily routines, Keillor seeks to help us overcome the hang-ups that have stayed with us since our school days about all those Sphinx-like stanzas that might as well have been written in a foreign language.

A poet, he insists, explores the same themes as a novelist, and with many notable exceptions, the results can be equally accessible.

Although it sounds like a contradiction in terms, Keillor assures us there are practical poets who realize their readers cannot focus all their attention on the multiple meanings of several, succeeding cryptic word groupings.

In choosing material for "The Writer's Almanac," Keillor has decided "good poems" are those which can strike a haunting note inside the ear canal that is "otherwise engaged."

He knows better than to try to penetrate the "static" of his listeners' hectic morning preparations with "the stuff that is too airy or that refers off-handedly to the poet Li-Po or relies on your familiarity with butterflies or Spanish or Monet."

A master storyteller in his own right, he realizes he has a much better chance of intriguing us, of getting us to tune in tomorrow, with a few lines which "incorporate some story, some cadence or shadow of story."

After all, "a story is easier to remember than a puzzle."

And, like stories told in any other format, they matter because "they offer a truer account than what we're used to getting. They surprise us with clear pictures of the familiar."

Randomly paging through the 19 distinct parts which Keillor divides his favorite tales told outside the bounds of prose, I grow uncomfortably aware of what I have lost by making no effort to keep up with the increasingly marginalized literary category poetry has come to occupy.

Certainly I could make time for just one poem a day, I scold myself each time I fail to recognize a byline and have to jump to the biography section at the end to put credentials to the name.

I can always learn from other points of view on such far-ranging topics as love and marriage, friendship and family, music, work, our vanishing rural landscape, the color yellow, death.

My senses could readily stand to be more keenly attuned to all things that give pleasure and pain — the aching happiness that accompanies a first love, its melancholy aftermath.

Granted, I have taken no more than token notice of poetry since college. Nonetheless, I recognize several of Keillor's inclusions and am surprised by some of his omissions. There is not a scrap of John Donne or William Wordsworth here. He honestly prefers "Home on the Range" to "No man is an island…"? Okay.

Apparently gravity has also pulled me closer to the earth's surface over the years. My tastes have altered considerably since my late teens and early twenties, my romantic-to-the-point-of-maudlin period during which I copied out poems for journals and scrapbooks.

Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnet XLIII," one of Keillor's selections to celebrate "lovers," undoubtedly would have resonated with me then, when I was yet too green to count on the consequences of high expectations. It memorably begins, "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten …"

Was Millay substance or myth? Did she really throw all caution to the wind and let nothing stand in the way of her desires?

These days I can better relate to the bittersweet sensibility of Tess Gallagher's "I Stop Writing the Poem." I recently took a week of vacation, not to travel, but to catch up on my reading, writing, cleaning and organizing. So, I can well understand why, for most people, reading anything other than the newspaper is a guilty pleasure.

Forced to stop writing her poem "to fold the clothes," Gallagher promises herself, somewhat unconvincingly, that she will eventually resume where she left off. In between the endless household chores always awaiting her, she is determined to squeeze in a little solitude to pursue essential, universal truths.

. . . I'll get back

to the poem. I'll get back to being

a woman. But for now

there's a shirt, a giant shirt

in my hands, and somewhere a small girl

standing next to her mother

watching to see how it's done.

Likewise, I vow to revise this piece later, to check for typos, to replace awkward phrases, and to split my run-on thoughts into managable sentences. But just now I must pause.

There are pressing errands to be run and clothes which need to be washed before they can be folded.

Kvasnicka, a former East Village Magazine news editor, has been the magazine's contributing editor and research consultant since 1989. She is the librarian at the Genesee District Library's Goodrich Branch.

• < Prev
• Next >