Poetry Is Fine, but I Don’t Like It

January 21, 2007

As I was adding the date to this article and beginning to type it (in other words, just now), I realized that my three longest-term best friends are all huge fans of poetry. I am not, of course—something that attentive readers will have gathered by now.

The problem is probably religion. I can say for sure that for two of my three poetry-loving friends, Sunday trips to church at the very least were weekly requirements from early childhood through adolescence. One of these two is the son of a man who is a leader in his community (some sort of Protestant thing, I assume), and this friend of mine has even recently been known to advocate for the importance of the person who is supposed to have been gotten off the hook by getting himself resurrected. The other one is the son of a preacher (Pentecostal I think; there was some mention of speaking in tongues) and a mother who absolutely loves Bob Dylan; moreover, his primary username—i.e., the string of text to the left of the "at" symbol in the e-mail address that he gives out to people—is the beginning of an E. E. Cummings* poem. The third one I'm not so sure about. I'd have to ask him, but his late father was a Rhodes scholar and his mother is British, either or both of which could explain things. Or maybe it's because, being a talented architect who grew up partly in Manhattan and partly on Long Island, and having been exposed as a teenager to Leaves of Grass with all its faith in buildings and machinery, he had some sort of conversion experience that was closed to me. (I was listening to vinyl records and enjoying my math homework in high school.)

So that's those three. And the funny thing about them is they don't hate me.

I like prose. I like tons of information. My favorite works tend to be the multivolume ones—because they don't seem to ever need to come to an end. If I didn't have to work for a living, I'd spend at least some of my days, in bed, rereading Henry Miller's five-volume Rosy Crucifixion (five, because you have to include the two tropical books as prolegomena [just kidding: I never use that word] to the trilogy) or John Updike's Rabbit books or Proust's novel: those don't let me down or tease me.

But the solution to the mystery is not my love of lots of words (and, if you haven't been able to tell until now, my love of wordiness in and of itself)—in other words, my opposition to any kind of economy when it comes to saying something—no: the answer can be found in my preferences when it comes to music. I love classical music, but especially the stuff written only for the piano and played by people who devoted their entire lives to the piano—V. Horowitz, Glenn Gould, A. Rubinstein (each absolutely unrelated to the other: Horowitz: childish Russian-Jewish homosexual; Gould: hyperintellectual, neurotic Protestant celibate and telephonaholic; Rubinstein: intensely narcissistic and socially intelligent Jewish Romeo). There are no words, but I am in love with every turn of phrase. (This reverence is something I happen to have shared on many occasions with two of my three friends; maybe that's the bridge.)

I'll also very occasionally enjoy, for example, an opera by Mozart (before you cringe, you have to remember to be fair; if you're super young and very hip and you're reading this [unlikely, I know], remember that Mozart was always young and hipper than most of you for most of his life, and he probably had more fun than you and certainly wrote better music than you did, so please don't limit your notions of Mozart to the idea of a fussy Allan Bloom trying to teach his University of Chicago acolytes about great music in the face of the scourge of 1980s popular culture, the product of choices made by an electorate that comprises twelve-year-olds, a trend that continues today)—but mainly for the music and not for the words. It does help my enjoyment to know the plot, but I don't need a word-by-word translation in my hands when I'm listening, and it would be ridiculous to have one at an actual opera. I don't go to operas, of course: those who insisted on displaying those English words above the stage at American opera houses were just responding to the fact that the core audience is one for which there is a horror of ever appearing stupid or not knowing the right answer. (It's funny: you'd think the people who remember to floss their teeth and show up for their colonoscopy appointments would take the trouble to know the opera they plan on taking in before they take their seats. But in the old days—when Mozart was still alive—people were free to talk through the performances, so it's never really mattered anyway.)

I like all forms of music, as all people do. And when I'm not listening to classical, I sometimes choose rock and roll. But I prefer the stuff that has words that don't matter: e.g., Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, the Who—but for those venerable bands I only pay attention to what was produced up through December 1978 (the month of the last studio recordings by Led Zeppelin and the year that Keith Moon died) and absolutely no more beyond that. In any case, the thing that two of those three bands shared was a disdain for lyrics. I didn't even know that Mick Jagger was raised by a "toothless, bearded hag" until I was well into adulthood, because my childhood conception of his brazenly mumbled rendition of it on the recording took a long time to erase (at one point I think I thought that "toothless" was "two-breast"). The Who's lyrics probably matter, but they're usually more than compensated for by Keith Moon's great drumming (in other words, you can sort of take or leave what's being sung on Quadrophenia as you listen to its wall of sound; but remove the sound entirely and leave just the lyrics and only parts of Tommy and some of the confessional stuff from 1975 or 1978 truly stand up). Finally, Robert Plant's only role in Led Zeppelin was as the band's official ego trip; he sang about things that didn't matter—sex or the Hobbit.

My two least favorite bands of all time are, without question, U2 and REM.† They are both great bands, no question, but, for one thing, I always assumed (wrongly, I'm sure) that the Irish problems were sort of silly. Yes, yes: they've suffered brutally, but come on: the landscape's beautiful, the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics are no more than throwbacks, and the Irish have always had the consolation of alcohol. If you ask nine out of ten American students in MFA programs (especially the ones for creative writing) where they'd want to spend five years, they'd answer Ireland before Sudan or the Philippines or Iraq or the Palestinian territories or Pakistan or Tibet. As for REM, I prefer the Allman Brothers and their acceptance that the only thing that ever came out of the South that mattered was the blues and that it mattered so much that they and every other rock and roll band are merely extensions of that impulse. So, I don't care at all what U2 or REM have to say.‡

And that about covers it. I'd be the first to admit that my lack of sensitivity to poetry is a defect, not an attribute. And when I say I don't like it, I'm talking about my way of looking at the world and not about poetry. I'd love to love poetry. I'd love to have nice, thick, longish hair and to smoke cigarettes and not be worried about having to run up hills to condition myself. I'd like to be able to hear Bob Dylan's words behind the horrible sound of his voice and his terrible taste in acoustics. (I've recently started to appreciate the Beatles a little bit, in spite of their inability to play the blues, and I think they were pretty smart with their producer's help and I can listen to their lyrics; and I wonder if that counts as appreciating verse.)

But don't worry: there may be hope for me yet. After all, Thomas Hardy—an avowed opponent of the Anglican Church if not an outright atheist—turned entirely to poetry in middle age, after years of writing nothing but novels, most of which exposed the misery of life. Meanwhile, at his death, his Christian countrymen honored him with a proper burial, letting bygones be bygones. We'll see.

*"Why not lowercase, Mr. Harper?" E. E. Cummings didn't spell his name with lowercase letters; that was his publishers' idea. Besides, even if you lowercase your name (and any pronouns standing in for your name), one day you'll be dead.

†And, I should add, the Talking Heads. I'm sure that David Byrne is a modern-day genius. But I've always thought that such people should be writers and not musicians. I don't like to mix nerdiness with sound. I prefer music to be musical—based on sound and not on geeky experiments. But it's probably just that I'm looking into a kind of mirror, and, seeing aspects of myself, I recoil. So apologies to David Byrne fans. He's the best I'm sure.

‡"What about new music?" New music has problems right now. First, I don't like the sound of most of the things that can be called rap or which are related to rap. That makes the lyrics irrelevant to me. (Plus, though I'm a fan of the word "motherfucker," I've never enjoyed it all that much in a musical context.) Second, "rock and roll" bands—even or especially the ones like the White Stripes who are devoted to the bands I love—give me only an interpretation of the real thing; my ability to live in the past (i.e., pretend while listening to Led Zeppelin from 1970 that 1971 hadn't yet happened and nobody'd gotten old and SUVs with amply apportioned cupholders had yet to make it on the scene and college kids didn't walk around, looking dazed, while listening to compressed files of some eclectic music or other that defines them as some sort of gadget-era phenomenon), well, let's just say that there isn't time enough in the day for me to justify not giving some of Haydn's piano sonatas more time to fill my thoughts. I apologize to all of you who like new music, a lot of which I'm sure is exciting and great.

© 2010 Russell David Harper