I was walking down Front Street last December, snow coming down like a scene on a Hallmark card, clear lights sparkling on the small trees, the big tree on Cass Street all multicolored and happy, the State Theater sending its glorious glow out onto the snow, and I was thinking how we humans work to make beauty. How we make movies and poems and stories and buildings, hoping to do just that.
So, what is human beauty, according to Albert Goldbarth's poem?
What we make is always "insufficient," as he says.
It's not as real or as complete as the "real thing" we want to mirror -- love or death or snow -- but it is our own "distinctly human" kind.
Our art and all our attempts are like paper snow, but look, in this poem, it's absorbed into the real snow!
It was made in praise of real snow, and it has become part of it.
During this season many of us are hanging greens, working in food banks, lighting candles, sending cards, writing music or poems, doing whatever we do to make the season beautiful.
The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich said that the metaphors we make actually begin to participate in the reality of what they were made to stand for.
Whatever our art form, it can't accurately or completely describe love or death -- or snow -- but it isn't just a poor copy, or a poor metaphor.
It actually becomes part of the reality we're trying to capture. It's as if beauty were a big snowball, gathering all our efforts, making itself bigger and bigger as it rolls downhill.
If you want a wild ride, you should read more of Albert Goldbarth's work. Albert (born in Chicago in 1948) is a dear, acerbic and funny man who refuses to touch a computer, who keeps his only phone in a room behind a shut door so he won't have to answer unless he feels like it.
He collects vintage comic books and small plastic toys. He writes like a maniac, turning out book after book of poems and essays that build their beauty like an erector set, from the odd small pieces other people might leave out.
The poem I quote here is one of his more "tame." I can see his smirk, if he heard me say that. No poem is tame if it's a good one, he'd say.
Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. For more of Fleda Brown's On Poetry columns, log on to www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry.
Human Beauty
If you write a poem about love ...
the love is a bird,
the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death ...
the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames
you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between
our gestures and the power they address
-- an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,
a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night
in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box
of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white
confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.
-- Albert Goldbarth
from "The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems 1972-2007," Graywolf Press, 2007.
