Here's to Poets

I am ignorant of poetry. Not by my choice, exactly, but by that of my elders and betters, specifically, the school board in Torrington, Connecticut (circa late 1930's.) I can't fault them. It was the depression. There wasn't any money to spare on useless frills, such as replacing textbooks. What had been good enough for our parents was deemed to be good enough for us. There were also known to be a lot of radicals advocating dangerous ideas. The safer course was to make sure that all ideas were boring, which the curriculum was brilliantly designed to accomplish.

We were especially well protected from poetical tendencies by a prophylactic injection of the New England poets. As a ten year old I memorized some of their jingles (not REAL poetry, as I knew even then) and still remember them:

"Over the rude bridge that arched the flood
to grandmother's house went Hiawatha,
(a fearful trip on a burning deck,
his wang by April's breeze uncooled.)
Oh Captain, My Captain
is the pudding done?"


Let's face it, being required to learn such stuff at a recalcitrant age, was a near certain guarantee that none of us would ever look at another poem.

Happily, it was not a completely successful strategy. I have read a few poems in the ensuing 67 years, and have even met a few poets. One of my favorite memories is hearing my friend Verlena Orr recite her poem on learning how to swear. I can still see her father, (a large, raw-boned man, I imagine, wearing overalls borrowed from a Dorothea Lange photo) hammering on a piece of farm machinery. His vivid curses light up the sky around his Idaho farm. An awe-stricken little girl takes it all in.

 Sadly, I was not aware of the poet, Donald Hall, formerly 'poet laureate' of the United States, until a few days ago. A friend gave me a copy of his book 'Essays After Eighty' an amusing retrospective of his life in the poetry game. (He claims that in his mid-eighties he no longer has enough testosterone to write poetry.)

In an essay entitled 'Thank You, Thank You' he comments on poetic fame. He had been engaged to read his poems to an audience of students for an hour. As he approached the podium he was told to cut his reading to half an hour because the second half of the hour was required for the election of the Homecoming Queen.

He read for half an hour--and was vigorously applauded. ("An audience applauds longest when it knows it has not been paying attention.") As he left the stage, the podium was taken over by the previous year's Homecoming Queen, who would preside over the election.

"Now." said the retiring Queen, "now comes the moment you have been waiting for!"

The story reminded me of a poignant paragraph in Yeats' Autobiography, remembered from 1960 (I was in graduate school in Chicago, and should have been reading something else) about a poem Yeats had read (or perhaps, written) about a woman who was a queen, and the daughter of a queen, and the grand-daughter of a queen, a charming, mystical image.

I still have the autobiography, an Anchor paperback published in 1958. I'm looking for that passage--so far without any luck. I used to have a nearly eidetic memory for page placement--once I had read something I could infallibly turn to the same page again. Maybe 55 years is too much of a stretch.

Or maybe I'm remembering something that never existed. Yeats confessed in a Preface dated 'Christmas Day 1914' that, "I have changed nothing to my knowledge; and yet it must be that I have changed many things without my knowledge; for I am writing after many years and have consulted neither friend, nor letter, nor old newspaper, and describe what comes oftenest to memory."

In other words--he might have been improving reality, spinning gold from straw--as poets do.

This is the part where I meant to say something clever about the relative importance of Queens and Poets.

I forget what I had in mind.