Dear Friend,
Someone once asked me, “how does a poem begin?”
“A poem begins with a deep breath and a thrilling leap,” I said. “The first line, the first word, is the terrifying, exhilarating act of letting go.”
Sometimes, maybe. But sometimes a poem begins in much simpler ways. There’s the poetry of life. In friendship, for example. Perhaps that’s why I begin each of these posts, “Dear Friend.” My friends, for example, recently sent me a lovely phone case for my birthday, featuring a raven and stack of books, accented in one of my favorite colors. I would have been grateful for any gift, but this one immediately resonated, because I have an affinity for ravens and always have. (It might have started upon my first read of Poe’s infamous poem, but if I’m begin honest, I think my interest in ravens pre-dated even that.)
In any case, when I opened the package and saw this raven phone case, I was filled with gratitude for my thoughtful friends, yes, but my mind also went immediately to the things that resonate with me about ravens, and what the presence of ravens in my life has signified at various times. And isn’t that where the poems really begin? Resonance. Reminders. Memory and emotion. Friendships and distance. Struggle and triumph. Life.
Thus, it seems to be, so far, in Diane Seuss’s Modern Poetry.
Modern Poetry
Of these first ten poems we’ve read together, my first favorite is the titular “Modern Poetry.” The poem explores, primarily, a course the speaker took in modern poetry, and how it changed her life. It could have easily been called, “my education,” because it is this education in poetry that is emphasized as shaping the speaker, her sense of self and the direction of her future. I can pinpoint a similar experience in my academic journey, when I declared myself an English major late in the game–sometime in my junior year, in fact. I was, to that point, studying science as a pre-med student, with every intention of going to medical school. But then I enrolled in an elective course in literature, and everything changed. Everything.
“I was beginning to understand, but barely,” she writes, and I think of a moment I had, sitting in a 300-level literature course and watching my professor with true awe as he made connections across time and space, and genres. He wasn’t speaking just about the plot of the book we were reading together, but about everything that influenced its creation, everything in creation that had been influenced by it. I stayed after class to ask, “how do you do that? How can you make all these connections between this book and so many other things?”
“It takes time,” he said. And not long ago, I experienced the other side of this conversation, and I was in awe again. Awed by the poetry of time.
A Cobbled Mind
It’s a good thing that Seuss didn’t name “Modern Poetry” the way I suggested, because soon enough, we get to a poem named, “My Education.” The speaker continues her exploration of personal growth by comparing her experiential learning to that of insects: “Ants know earth. Dragonflies / know air. A cobbled mind is not fatal. / You have to be willing to self-educate” (17).
I think the key point in this poem comes just after this line, where she writes, “You have to be willing . . . to be caught in your own ignorance.” There’s a lovely example of mispronouncing words, which is something I often talk with my students about, the students who are afraid to read aloud because they might get embarrassed. I tell them I love to hear people mispronounce words because that means they have been reading. I hope it soothes some of their nerves because it’s true. Imagine shaming someone for learning and attempting to apply that learning? Why do we shame what is brave? “Your poems will be your own,” Seuss writes, and there’s poetry in the act of creation.
The Grooves Were Dug Deep
In “Juke,” Seuss is “talking about a time and a place” that is real. There’s a sense of delight in the simple things. A nostalgia for what we can only recognize in retrospect as having been something special and formative because it seemed at the time inconsequential. I can imagine finding “the juke of my dreams” (19) as this speaker does, and how it might thrill me. We all have a certain something, maybe it’s ravens, maybe it’s juke boxes, that we connect with on an almost spiritual level, even when there’s seemingly nothing spiritual about it. They cause a stir deep inside of us, a movement toward joy and wonder that makes the thrill of the find something insensible, and secret.
These are the treasures of human experience, the individual expressions of our individual experiences, and I think they’re such a delight because they remind us of the difference between a respectful desire–a need for connection–and commercial cravings. We are a culture of people who’ve been trained to feed on more. To be constantly upgrading and updating, replacing and collecting. But there’s poetry in the limited treasures of things unseen or rarely found. There’s poetry in the surprise.
Meditation
“It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem. You can’t hide / from what you made / inside what you made.” –Diane Seuss
With love and poetry,
~Adam
Contemplative Reading Project 
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