RSSSeeking the extraordinary.
Apr 17
Poetry, Reading, Uncategorized, Writing Happy bedfellows, national poetry month, Nick Flynn, Octavio Paz, poetry is the bestest! Comments Off
First, an apology for not posting yesterday. We we’re busy welcoming family from out of town, which turned into a bit of a comedy of flerrors when their flight was diverted to Dulles due to weather and we wound up doing crosswords in the airport for a few hours. But even though I wasn’t writing about poetry, I was thinking about it (and I hope this post will make up for my absence).
Case in point: we made a brief stop in the airport Borders to kill some time. I poked around a bit, perusing the new arrivals and bargain books, when I realized that although they had sections for fiction, history, business, children, young adult, mystery, science fiction, and even graphic novels, there wasn’t any poetry to be found. I don’t suppose that’s all that surprising, but it got me to thinking about the way poetry is sidelined, left for expansive bookstores where a shelf of poetry can be shoved to the side or the smaller bookstores that make it their mission to fill the absence felt in major chains.
I know I’ve talked about it before this month, but I think that absence of poetry says a lot about our culture. Poetry is a medium of emotion, of awe, of raw observation, of formal experimentation. We (and I say we because I am as guilty of this as anyone) seek things that are interpreted for us, we look for stories that make emotions familiar or easy to digest. We want to be entertained, and we want it to be easy. Poetry doesn’t do that for us. Poetry asks us to interpret for ourselves, to be willing to be amazed.
With that in mind, I want to look at two poems today. The first is Octavio Paz’s “Pedestrian.” The second is Nick Flynn’s “Flood.” I see in them a dialogue, a mutual exploration of the way so many of us shy away from the grit, the core of life.
First, in “Pedestrian,” we get the image of a man walking, on a day like any other: “He walked among the crowds / on the Boulevard Sebasto, / thinking about things.”
Instantly, we are given something we can all connect to–we have been that man, lost in thought about work, about the errands we need to run, alone among the crowd. Then Paz stops the man, makes him wait at a red light, gives him a moment to notice things, to look up and see that “over / the gray roofs, silver / among the brown birds, / a fish flew.”
More than anything this is a moment crafted for awe, for amazement, for curiosity and questioning. But the man, the reader’s surrogate, does what we all would do, is too be drawn away again as the light turns green and he steps into the street, shaking his head, he wonders “what he’d been thinking.” He dismisses this amazing, crazy thing, knows it to be impossible. He doesn’t even bother to muse on the odd twist in his day, how the fish, even if it is only a trick of his imagination, is something worth noting.
Conversely, in his poem “Flood,” Nick Flynn actively embraces the strange, the curious, invites his reader along with him as the speaker of his poem experiences it for them. That speaker describes the titular flood, the detritus of a disaster as it drifts by while he seeks ever-higher ground.
In doing so, he recalls that “In grade school I heard / clouds could weight three tons & I wondered // why they didn’t all just fall to the ground.” He continues in a similar line of thinking as he tells us “I study rain, each drop shaped / like a comet, ten million of them, as if a galaxy // had exploded above us.”
What I love about Flynn’s poem is that he finds beauty and mystery in a flood, the kind of thing most see only as disaster and destruction. His speaker is the opposite of Paz’s pedestrian, caught up in the whorl of everyday and perfectly happy to stay there.
That’s why I love poetry. Because there is enough every day to go around, because it is far too easy to get caught up in the mundane, because we are taught throughout our lives to be logical and to explain away the extraordinary. With poetry, read or written, we find a chance to escape that way of thinking. So I say three cheers for the extraordinary.