Poetry as Prozac, as jazz, basketball, etc.
July 17, 2006 | 12:00am
Trawling the Internet and engaging in e-mail correspondence with half the known world continues to provide a treasure trove of trivia as well as various prized collectibles.
On poetry, here’s sharing recent pick-ups, as nuggets of thought and verbalization, plus a poem, which you readers might want to store yourselves, as valuable keepsakes.
We begin with a couple of related quotes:
"Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery." – Stephen Dunn (poet and essayist)
"Basketball is jazz: improvisatory, free, individualistic, corporate, sweaty, fast, exulting, screeching, torrid, explosive, exquisitely designed for letting first the trumpet, then the sax, then the drummer, then the trombonist soar away in virtuoso excellence." – Michael Novak (author and editor)
That’s also how it is with poetry, we dare say. All the adjectives brought to bear by Mr. Novak, on basketball as jazz, apply to poetry, which also thrives on orchestrated parts that can individually turn virtuosic.
Next are excerpts from an interesting short article titled "Is Poetry the new Prozac?" by Christina Patterson, dated 27 January 2006.
"Poetry is good for your health. That, at least, is the premise of studies currently under way for the Arts Council and the Department of Health. One study, published a couple of years ago in the journal Psychological Reports, suggested that writing poetry boosted levels of secretory immunoglobin A. Another, undertaken by a consultant at Bristol Royal Infirmary, concluded that poetry enabled seven per cent of mental health patients to be weaned off their anti-depressants. Poetry, it seems, is not the new rock ‘n’ roll, but the new Prozac.
"This was not instantly evident at the ceremony for the T.S. Eliot poetry prize last week. Perhaps it was the strip-lighting, but the assembled throng of pasty faces and panda-shadowed eyes did little to foster a sense of radiant health. As feel-good events go, it ranked just above a tussle with your online tax return, but probably below a Thai takeaway in front of Celebrity Big Brother. It was, of course, not fair of Cyril Connolly to describe poets as ‘jackals fighting over an empty well,’ but it is true that £10,000 prizes do not, on the whole, boost the health and happiness of those who don’t win.
"The prize, in any case, went to a paean to psychosis. Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of love poems, Rapture, is a moving and, at times, skin-crawlingly accurate portrayal of a process that psychologists have recently identified as a form of madness. We have all been there: tending the mobile ‘like an injured bird,’ repeating the name ‘like a charm, like a spell.’ For most of us, falling in love is a season in what Duffy calls ‘glamorous hell,’ and not a sojourn. We might suffer a few sleepless nights, or even eat a bit less than usual, but we can’t sustain life at this pitch. And, luckily for us, our minds comply.
"Many poets – a higher proportion, apparently, than of the average population – are not so lucky. John Clare, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and, most famously, Sylvia Plath, all knew the torments of a mind that would, on occasion, burst out of the crucible of what Freud called ‘normal human misery’ into the nameless horrors of mania. The mad poet may be a cliché, but it is not a myth. Poets continue to write of their experiences of mental illness. If poetry is some kind of wonder drug, it sure ain’t working for them.
"So who is making these headline-hitting assertions, and why? The answer, of course, is arts administrators, and they’re doing it for money. And kindness, and the philanthropic impulse, and passion and a desire to help the lost and the lonely and the miserable and the mad….
"A current project is a good example. Poems in the Waiting Room was set up by an enthusiastic social worker eight years ago. Run, like most of these things, on a shoestring, it has had little pots of funds from trusts and foundations as well as the Arts Council, the Poetry Society and the Foreign Office. Its aims are, you’d have thought, worthy and modest: to cheer up miserable places (hospital waiting rooms) at an anxious time with a little injection of art….
"There is, in the right hands, a fine role for poetry as social work, but let’s not pretend that it’s the same as poetry as art. Poetry, like all art, is not a panacea. Perhaps it’s more like homeopathy. A great placebo – some people swear by it – but the studies are inconclusive."
Here in Manila, we know that UP Institute of Creative Writing director, Vim Carmelo Nadera, has applied poetry appreciation and writing in support programs for cancer patients. And Vim waxes positively about the results, lifting poetry to more than just that level of panacea or placebo that Ms. Paterson wrote about.
Then we have the following bold declarations about poetry from distinguished poet Marvin Bell, whom we met in the University of Iowa nearly three decades ago, when he was still a guiding influence there.
Titled "Thirty-two Statements About Writing Poetry," this appeared in the Commemorative 2002 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle.
"1) Every poet is an experimentalist.
"2) Learning to write is a simple process: read something, then write something; read something else, then write something else. And show in your writing what you have read.
"3) There is no one way to write and no right way to write.
"4) The good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.
"5) Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.
"6) You do not learn from work like yours as much as you learn from work unlike yours.
"7) Originality is a new amalgam of influences.
‘8) Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.
"9) The I in the poem is not you but someone who knows a lot about you.
"10) Autobiography rots.
"11) A poem listens to itself as it goes.
"12) It’s not what one begins with that matters; it’s the quality of attention paid to it thereafter.
"13) Language is subjective and relative, but it also overlaps; get on with it.
"14) Every free verse writer must reinvent free verse.
"15) Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.
"16) A short poem need not be small.
"17) Rhyme and meter, too, can be experimental.
"18) Poetry has content but is not strictly about its contents. A poem containing a tree may not be about a tree.
"19) You need nothing more to write poems than bits of string and thread and some dust from under the bed.
"20) At heart, poetic beauty is tautological: it defines its terms and exhausts them.
"21) The penalty for education is self-consciousness. But it is too late for ignorance.
"22) What they say ‘there are no words for’ – that’s what poetry is for. Poetry uses words to go beyond words.
"23) One does not learn by having a teacher do the work.
"24) The dictionary is beautiful; for some poets, it’s enough.
"25) Writing poetry is its own reward and needs no certification. Poetry, like water, seeks its own level.
"26) A finished poem is also the draft of a later poem.
"27) A poet sees the differences between his or her poems but a reader sees the similarities.
"28) Poetry is a manifestation of more important things. On the one hand, it’s poetry! On the other, it’s just poetry.
"29) Viewed in perspective, Parnassus is a very short mountain.
"30) A good workshop continually signals that we are all in this together, teacher too.
"31) This Depression Era jingle could be about writing poetry: Use it up / wear it out / make it do / or do without.
"32) Art is a way of life, not a career.
Finally, we share an Alastair Reid translation of a poem by Pablo Neruda, the poet who makes women sigh (especially after Il Postino), titled "Poet’s Obligation."
"To whoever is not listening to the sea/this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up/in house or office, factory or woman/or street or mine or harsh prison cell;/to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,/I arrive and open the door of his prison,/ and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,/a great fragment of thunder sets in motion/the rumble of the planet and the foam,/the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,/the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,/and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.//
"So, drawn on by my destiny,/I ceaselessly must listen to and keep/the sea’s lamenting in my awareness,/I must feel the crash of the hard water/ and gather it up in a perpetual cup/so that, wherever those in prison may be,/wherever they suffer the autumn’s castigation,/I may be there with an errant wave,/I may move, passing through windows,/and hearing me, eyes will glance upward/saying ‘How can I reach the sea?’/And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,/the starry echoes of the wave,/a breaking up of foam and quicksand,/a rustling of salt withdrawing,/the gray cry of the sea-birds on the coast.//
"So, through me, freedom and the sea/will make their answer to the shuttered heart."
As W.H. Auden wrote, indeed, "Poetry makes nothing happen./ It survives, in the valley of its saying/ like a mouth…" Or like a heart, shuttered or not.
Poetry is, and will be.
On poetry, here’s sharing recent pick-ups, as nuggets of thought and verbalization, plus a poem, which you readers might want to store yourselves, as valuable keepsakes.
We begin with a couple of related quotes:
"Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery." – Stephen Dunn (poet and essayist)
"Basketball is jazz: improvisatory, free, individualistic, corporate, sweaty, fast, exulting, screeching, torrid, explosive, exquisitely designed for letting first the trumpet, then the sax, then the drummer, then the trombonist soar away in virtuoso excellence." – Michael Novak (author and editor)
That’s also how it is with poetry, we dare say. All the adjectives brought to bear by Mr. Novak, on basketball as jazz, apply to poetry, which also thrives on orchestrated parts that can individually turn virtuosic.
Next are excerpts from an interesting short article titled "Is Poetry the new Prozac?" by Christina Patterson, dated 27 January 2006.
"Poetry is good for your health. That, at least, is the premise of studies currently under way for the Arts Council and the Department of Health. One study, published a couple of years ago in the journal Psychological Reports, suggested that writing poetry boosted levels of secretory immunoglobin A. Another, undertaken by a consultant at Bristol Royal Infirmary, concluded that poetry enabled seven per cent of mental health patients to be weaned off their anti-depressants. Poetry, it seems, is not the new rock ‘n’ roll, but the new Prozac.
"This was not instantly evident at the ceremony for the T.S. Eliot poetry prize last week. Perhaps it was the strip-lighting, but the assembled throng of pasty faces and panda-shadowed eyes did little to foster a sense of radiant health. As feel-good events go, it ranked just above a tussle with your online tax return, but probably below a Thai takeaway in front of Celebrity Big Brother. It was, of course, not fair of Cyril Connolly to describe poets as ‘jackals fighting over an empty well,’ but it is true that £10,000 prizes do not, on the whole, boost the health and happiness of those who don’t win.
"The prize, in any case, went to a paean to psychosis. Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of love poems, Rapture, is a moving and, at times, skin-crawlingly accurate portrayal of a process that psychologists have recently identified as a form of madness. We have all been there: tending the mobile ‘like an injured bird,’ repeating the name ‘like a charm, like a spell.’ For most of us, falling in love is a season in what Duffy calls ‘glamorous hell,’ and not a sojourn. We might suffer a few sleepless nights, or even eat a bit less than usual, but we can’t sustain life at this pitch. And, luckily for us, our minds comply.
"Many poets – a higher proportion, apparently, than of the average population – are not so lucky. John Clare, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and, most famously, Sylvia Plath, all knew the torments of a mind that would, on occasion, burst out of the crucible of what Freud called ‘normal human misery’ into the nameless horrors of mania. The mad poet may be a cliché, but it is not a myth. Poets continue to write of their experiences of mental illness. If poetry is some kind of wonder drug, it sure ain’t working for them.
"So who is making these headline-hitting assertions, and why? The answer, of course, is arts administrators, and they’re doing it for money. And kindness, and the philanthropic impulse, and passion and a desire to help the lost and the lonely and the miserable and the mad….
"A current project is a good example. Poems in the Waiting Room was set up by an enthusiastic social worker eight years ago. Run, like most of these things, on a shoestring, it has had little pots of funds from trusts and foundations as well as the Arts Council, the Poetry Society and the Foreign Office. Its aims are, you’d have thought, worthy and modest: to cheer up miserable places (hospital waiting rooms) at an anxious time with a little injection of art….
"There is, in the right hands, a fine role for poetry as social work, but let’s not pretend that it’s the same as poetry as art. Poetry, like all art, is not a panacea. Perhaps it’s more like homeopathy. A great placebo – some people swear by it – but the studies are inconclusive."
Here in Manila, we know that UP Institute of Creative Writing director, Vim Carmelo Nadera, has applied poetry appreciation and writing in support programs for cancer patients. And Vim waxes positively about the results, lifting poetry to more than just that level of panacea or placebo that Ms. Paterson wrote about.
Then we have the following bold declarations about poetry from distinguished poet Marvin Bell, whom we met in the University of Iowa nearly three decades ago, when he was still a guiding influence there.
Titled "Thirty-two Statements About Writing Poetry," this appeared in the Commemorative 2002 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle.
"1) Every poet is an experimentalist.
"2) Learning to write is a simple process: read something, then write something; read something else, then write something else. And show in your writing what you have read.
"3) There is no one way to write and no right way to write.
"4) The good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.
"5) Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.
"6) You do not learn from work like yours as much as you learn from work unlike yours.
"7) Originality is a new amalgam of influences.
‘8) Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.
"9) The I in the poem is not you but someone who knows a lot about you.
"10) Autobiography rots.
"11) A poem listens to itself as it goes.
"12) It’s not what one begins with that matters; it’s the quality of attention paid to it thereafter.
"13) Language is subjective and relative, but it also overlaps; get on with it.
"14) Every free verse writer must reinvent free verse.
"15) Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.
"16) A short poem need not be small.
"17) Rhyme and meter, too, can be experimental.
"18) Poetry has content but is not strictly about its contents. A poem containing a tree may not be about a tree.
"19) You need nothing more to write poems than bits of string and thread and some dust from under the bed.
"20) At heart, poetic beauty is tautological: it defines its terms and exhausts them.
"21) The penalty for education is self-consciousness. But it is too late for ignorance.
"22) What they say ‘there are no words for’ – that’s what poetry is for. Poetry uses words to go beyond words.
"23) One does not learn by having a teacher do the work.
"24) The dictionary is beautiful; for some poets, it’s enough.
"25) Writing poetry is its own reward and needs no certification. Poetry, like water, seeks its own level.
"26) A finished poem is also the draft of a later poem.
"27) A poet sees the differences between his or her poems but a reader sees the similarities.
"28) Poetry is a manifestation of more important things. On the one hand, it’s poetry! On the other, it’s just poetry.
"29) Viewed in perspective, Parnassus is a very short mountain.
"30) A good workshop continually signals that we are all in this together, teacher too.
"31) This Depression Era jingle could be about writing poetry: Use it up / wear it out / make it do / or do without.
"32) Art is a way of life, not a career.
Finally, we share an Alastair Reid translation of a poem by Pablo Neruda, the poet who makes women sigh (especially after Il Postino), titled "Poet’s Obligation."
"To whoever is not listening to the sea/this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up/in house or office, factory or woman/or street or mine or harsh prison cell;/to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,/I arrive and open the door of his prison,/ and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,/a great fragment of thunder sets in motion/the rumble of the planet and the foam,/the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,/the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,/and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.//
"So, drawn on by my destiny,/I ceaselessly must listen to and keep/the sea’s lamenting in my awareness,/I must feel the crash of the hard water/ and gather it up in a perpetual cup/so that, wherever those in prison may be,/wherever they suffer the autumn’s castigation,/I may be there with an errant wave,/I may move, passing through windows,/and hearing me, eyes will glance upward/saying ‘How can I reach the sea?’/And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,/the starry echoes of the wave,/a breaking up of foam and quicksand,/a rustling of salt withdrawing,/the gray cry of the sea-birds on the coast.//
"So, through me, freedom and the sea/will make their answer to the shuttered heart."
As W.H. Auden wrote, indeed, "Poetry makes nothing happen./ It survives, in the valley of its saying/ like a mouth…" Or like a heart, shuttered or not.
Poetry is, and will be.
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