Poetry makes the world a better place

She thumped her plump hand on the desk and exclaimed, “Penis power!”  This was the definition of ‘phallocentric’ that my English Literature teacher gave to a room of mortified sixteen year-olds.  It was an uncomfortable moment for a class that had displayed our collective immaturity earlier that week when we giggled manically after a boy said “orgasm” instead of “organism” during Biology.

English Literature classes abounded in awkwardness as I struggled to understand adult ideas and emotions portrayed in classic works.  I couldn’t relate to the all-consuming infernos of love that Shakespeare described in iambic pentameter because my life consisted of finishing homework and speculating on whether Ross and Rachel would finally kiss in the next episode of ‘Friends’.  Memorising poetry for exams was like having to feign interest in tedious uncles at Chinese New Year to get my red envelopes stuffed with cash.

Over a decade later – having lived, loved and grieved a little more – I returned to poetry with new appreciation when my friend wrote me a birthday message on the back of a photocopied poem.  I was, at the time, trying to scramble out of a bog of deep despair by filling my life with hipster hobbies, constant company and late-night gin.  Sitting in Country Road Café, in the murmur of lunching women, clinking cutlery and the hiss of the coffee machine, I read the beginning of ‘Moderation is Not Negation of Intensity, But Helps Avoid Monotony’, by John Tagliabue.  I felt as though its words reached out, grabbed my face and looked directly into my eyes:

Will you stop for a while, stop trying to pull yourself / together / for some clear “meaning” – some momentary summary? / no one / can have poetry or dances or prayers or climaxes all day; / the ordinary / blankness of little dramatic consciousness is good for the / health sometimes….

Reading those verses was like catching my reflection in a window in an unguarded moment.  

I bought my first anthology of poetry and read it hungrily over many nights curled on my couch with a pot of English Breakfast tea cooling beside me.  Each surprising, luminous poem formed part of a chain onto which I clung to stop myself from drowning in misery.  Poems berated me out of my listlessness, whispered their confessions to me, gripped me with their images and thrilled me with their bluntness.  

I want this world.  I want to walk into / the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along / like I’m nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass / and I want to resist it. 

- ‘For Desire’ - Kim Addonizio

Having I grown up in a family in which the most ardent emotion was demonstrated by a pat on the shoulder, I was almost breathless at the raw intimacy in poetry.  I had goose bumps when I read ‘Waiting for God: Self Portrait as a Skeleton’, in which Mary Karr gave God the finger:

The winter Mother’s ashes came in a Ziploc bag / all skin was scorched from me / and my skull was a hard helmet I wore to pray / with my middle finger bone aimed at the light fixture – Come out / You fuck, I’d say, then wait for God to finish me / where I knelt…  

When friends were dull, work was overwhelming, family was infuriating and loneliness was suffocating, I drank the richness of poetry that chased the elusive, unspoken or unmentionable, and wrestled it down and named it into existence.  Poetry lifted the curtain of monotony from the world to flash glimpses of the extraordinary beauty that persisted just beneath the surface.  As Mary Karr wrote, “it was as if the poet’s burning taper touched some charred filament in my chest to light me up”.  When I eventually lifted my eyes from the pages and left my couch, the smouldering verses that I carried within me emboldened me to get on with life again.

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,

from bad to worse.  Some years, muscadel

faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,

sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;

elect an honest man; decide they care

enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.

Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go

amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

- ‘Sometimes’ – Sheenagh Pugh