Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
So wrote William Carlos Williams, who was a doctor as well as a poet; in his two roles he was concerned to keep us alive and well in both body and soul. For souls can die, he suggests, and die miserably, even if their bodies live on, for lack of what is found in poems.
So what is found in poems? Poems, first of all, are special feats of language, ways of using words that withdraw them from “news,” that is, from practical or useful functions in everyday communication. In such communication we hardly think of our words as words, just as we seldom notice our glasses or contact lenses when we are looking at something, or looking for something. Poems bring our attention both to what is being said and to the means of saying it. Its readers may find it difficult to attend to both at the same time, but if that is so it means only that we must read a poem more than once. More than twice, in fact, if it is a poem of any value. And that is part of a poem’s purpose: to slow us down.
We live in language; it inhabits us. It can also control us if we don’t think about it from time to time. Poems give us occasions to see language itself as a thing, not as a transparent medium for saying things, and to see it as a medium that affects our minds unconsciously.
Poetry used to rely on being beautiful, if we can still use that word, to make us appreciate that it is indeed a poem and that we must slow down for it and take it in, or enter into it, with full attention. Meter, rhyme, and many other sound effects, along with unusual word order, should induce a kind of alert trance.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
But even a poem without these traditional lovely features (this one is by Yeats) can signal to us that we are in a different world. The words in Williams’ sentence are very common and they do not sound beautiful, but he has arranged them in five short but uneven lines with varying indentations. It might sound like prose, but it isn’t prose. We are to slow down and give roughly equal weight to each line, even “for lack”—especially “for lack”—and take in the whole assertion as something surprising, even newsworthy. He has made the sentence not just surprising but a little strange, and more interesting than it would be if it were not so arranged. Poetry by various means removes “the film of familiarity,” as Coleridge put it, from the world, and from language itself.
We have learned, most of us, that our mental health may depend on periodic retreats from “the world” with its endless distractions and worries. Some of us count on meditation or yoga, others rely on “forest bathing” as we walk our dog, others go to church. I am suggesting that an hour with a poem every so often might serve similar but distinctive ends. Many forms of meditation involve emptying your mind and, in a seeming paradox, gaining “mindfulness” by doing so. I envy those who can achieve this state, but I find that an hour with a poem may be almost as good, by inducing me to forget myself and arrive at a kind of meditative mindfulness of the poem itself. It is intellectual labor—some poems are difficult—but it is done as much by a kind of osmosis as by looking up words in a dictionary or figuring out a metaphor, though those tasks too can be done with pleasure if you have achieved the right mood.
Simone Weil wrote about the importance of training yourself to be attentive, to give full and sustained attention to a thing, whether it is a natural object, a mathematical proof, or a poem. For her such a discipline was the best preparation for prayer, and for the intellectual love of God. Whether or not it might also act as an antidote to ADHD and to the ever shrinking attention span that modern media produce in all of us, it is at least a standard to aspire to. I think it like the state of mind of careful auto mechanics when they thoroughly understand and repair an intricate problem. Time flies, or stands still, as they adjust this and replace that, wholly absorbed in the work. The poet Auden said poems are “contraptions”: they can be taken apart and reassembled in your mind.
But they are also special speech acts that are meant to enchant, or at least they used to be. In reading poetry about poetry in the nineteenth century, by both men and women, I have been struck by how often words like “enchantment,” “charm,” “ravishment,” “ecstasy,” and “rapture” try to capture poetry’s effect on readers. Emily Dickinson may be describing this state of mind in her typically extreme way: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
Readers then, however, were more often really listeners. Until very recent times poetry was usually recited and listened to; a printed text was like a musical score: you had to know how to recite it, indeed to chant it. We have descriptions of how Wordsworth, Whitman, and a few other poets declaimed their own verses in incantatory tones. They didn’t “give a reading” in the modest, even apologetic, manner, that many of today’s poets do. (Rappers and slam performers, on the other hand, are returning us to an older mode, whatever we may think of their poems as texts.)
Poems were chanted a century ago because poetry was originally song. Among the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, and I think everywhere else in the world, poetry and music were inseparable. Sappho and Pindar sang their poems, and so did Homer. Not only that, but people danced to them, at least to lyric poems: they were choral odes, and a khoros was a group of dancers who sang. A good case can be made that even Homer’s epics were danced to!
Poetry today has mainly parted company with music, and even meter, not to mention rhyme, alliteration, and the like. But if it is a poem, it should invite a suspension of everyday concerns and a rapt focus on itself. It should demand thought, but also offer pleasure. You needn’t try to dance to it, but remember that it is a special kind of speech, and you should recite it as such. Enter into it and let it take you somewhere you haven’t been. It will help keep your mind and heart alive.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.