Sunday, February 14, 2010

Yesterday I took my sons to a funeral. Then I went grocery shopping. I shoveled out the barn. I made lentil soup and cheese wafers and listened to loud Bruce Springsteen songs and drank red wine and watched a ridiculous Jackie Chan movie. I read Our Mutual Friend. In between times I thought about being alive; and thought about how predictable and sentimental a reaction that is, after one has come home from a funeral; and thought also about how I had cried when the son of the woman who had died read a poem he had written for her. It was undoubtedly the first poem he'd ever written, and it was clumsy. Nonetheless, it did the work of poetry. It reached toward the terror of feeling, and it touched that terror, and it touched that feeling.

How is it that even bad poems can have such power? There is so much mystery to this art.

2 comments:

Ruth said...

And so life must go on. Poetry is a microscope that one focuses until the emotion is finally visible. Sometimes it simply doesn't matter if the poem is in focus for anyone other than the writer. That is so fortunate for many of us who dabble.

Nicelle C. Davis said...

I think (in the end) it is how a poem fails to be perfect that make if feel human--makes it seem like a living document. McGonagall's poems make me laugh, but there is still something about his desire to love (and love well) that makes his poetry interesting. If poetry is an effort towards love, well--who can really find fault in that?

Thanks for your wonderful post Dawn. Your blog is always a great read.

If anyone is interested--a taste of McGonagall can be found here: http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/poems/pgdisaster.htm