A Poetic Pause

I have a poetry tag, though it is rarely used. Poetry has been part of my life for over fifty years, but only recently have I taken notice of the social place of poetry in this changing world. My impression was that it held hardly any interest to people, especially young people, now. But some commentators have been disagreeing with that, saying that poetry, whether in the form of song lyrics, hip hop, or "slam" poetry readings is actually alive and well.

Let me share a bit of my personal history with poetry. When I was in my teens, and sporadically up to my early 30s, I wrote rather precious poetry myself, some of which was even published. I was astonished, when I was nineteen, to have a poem I submitted to an American literary magazine accepted and published. I'm still astonished. I never followed up on that because poetry for me was largely a private affair and I didn't really look for publication. At university in my early 20s I discussed my poetry with my English professor and he was reasonably encouraging. However, I was actually enrolled in the music department so didn't do anything with that. I did attend a poetry reading by Basil Bunting, who was in residence that year, and we became acquaintances, talking about poetry and music. As I recall, he was a fan of Andrés Segovia.

My tastes in poetry are pretty wide: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and the poets I selected for my set of songs, Songs from the Poets. Those included Li Po, Aristophanes, Anna Akhmatova, Rainer Maria Rilke, Victor Hugo, Wallace Stevens, Robert Graves, Philip Larkin (setting that one caused the loss of a very old friendship!), Theodore Roethke (my encounter with him was due to the aforementioned English professor), and John Donne.

I also like Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, but for me song lyrics are a slightly different category than poetry simple. But, of course, I set to music a whole bunch of examples of pure poetry, choosing ones that seemed to trigger some sort of musical response in me.

So do people read much literary poetry these days? Just old folks like myself?

For an envoi, here is one of my songs, Nuits de Juin by Victor Hugo and the only text not in English.

Here is the text of that short poem:

L’été, lorsque le jour a fui, de fleurs couverte

La plaine verse au loin un parfum enivrant ;

Les yeux fermés, l’oreille aux rumeurs entrouverte,

On ne dort qu’à demi d’un sommeil transparent.

Les astres sont plus purs, l’ombre paraît meilleure ;

Un vague demi-jour teint le dôme éternel ;

Et l’aube douce et pâle, en attendant son heure,

Semble toute la nuit errer au bas du ciel.