Six different poets on five different occasions will be visiting. The first of which was Stephen Burt, the poet and critic. The nature of the seminar is that each writer's visit involves three interactions. There first is the smaller, private, interview between the poet and a few students. The second is the lecture to the class. Third is a reading by the poet that is open to the campus and the general public.
I was fortunate enough to be one of the interviewers with Burt. My question during this seminar was to gauge the state of contemporary poetry and how it viewed itself in relationship to society. Burt is a poet who is heavily involved in the intellectual side of poetry. He is a professor at Harvard and has a blog on the Harriet Poetry Foundation site, a well-respected site for conversation which is part of Poetry Magazine, perhaps the best literary magazine in the country. I think this accounts for a certain disconnect between Burt's expectations for a reader and what typically happens.
Burt made the point in the interview that grade schools are not teaching poetry as much as they used to, and that students had less "technical knowledge" so as to read poetry better. By "technical knowledge", as far as I can assume, Burt meant the ability to deconstruct a poem for it's literary devices, aesthetics, and meaning. I asked the question if contemporary poetry required more "technical knowledge", to which he said no. However, as he continued to answer, it seemed he was mostly uncomfortable with saying poetry was slightly to blame for its contemporary disconnect.
Here is a poem by Burt:
At the Providence Zoo
Like the Beatles arriving from Britain,
the egret's descent on the pond
takes the reeds and visitors by storm:
it is a reconstructed marsh
environment, the next
best thing to living out your wild life.
*
Footbridges love the past.
And like the Roman questioner who learned
"the whole of the Torah while standing on one leg,"
flamingos are pleased to ignore us. It is not known
whether that Roman could learn to eat upside-down,
by dragging his tremendous head through streams.
*
Comical, stately, the newly-watched tortoises
mate; one pushes the other over the grass,
their hemispheres clicking, on seven legs
in toto. Together they make
a Sydney opera house,
a concatenation of anapests, almost a waltz.
*
Confined if not preserved,
schoolteachers, their charges, vigilant lemurs, wrens
and prestidigitating tamarins,
and dangerous badgers like dignitaries stare
at one another, hot
and concave in their inappropriate coats.
Having watched a boa
eat a rat alive,
the shortest child does as she was told?
looks up, holds the right hand
of the buddy system, and stands,
as she explains it, "still as a piece of pie."
I have chosen as a counterpoint a poet Burt describes as being unnapreciated in his time, T.S. Eliot:
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Disolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said,
"Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Half-past two,
The street-lamp said,
"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
So the hand of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along
the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
"Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smooths the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets
And female smells in shuttered rooms
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars."
The lamp said,
"Four o'clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."
The last twist of the knife.
I think it is fair to say that Eliot's is the more accesible poem. It takes very little to be engaged by his poem. And this is the poet considered by most critics to be the most intellectual poet of the modern age.
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