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Fleda Brown: On Poetry

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April 3, 2010

On Poetry: Smarter, braver with poems

Celebrate National Poetry Month in April

By FLEDA BROWN

April is National Poetry Month. So I have two quotations for you: The first is from "Asphodel" by the American poet and physician William Carlos Williams: "It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there."

The second is from the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam: "only in Russia is poetry respected -- it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"

Can poetry be that powerful? If so, how? First let me say, there's poetry and then there's poetry. Some is all hearts and flowers, confirming our collective prejudices and making us feel nothing but self-satisfied. The other slaps us awake, lets us see with new eyes.

Here's a beautiful and innocent little poem by Mandelstam about frost on a window. He was despised by the Bolsheviks because he didn't write poems that overtly supported the state's goals. His poems were too specific, too personal.

After the revolution, Mandelstam wrote a poem about Stalin in which he portrayed the dictator as having laughing cockroaches on his top lip and fingers like worms. If not for a phone conversation between Stalin and Boris Pasternak following his arrest, Mandelstam would have been sent immediately to the gulag and certain death. Instead, Stalin exiled him. After three years in exile, he returned to Moscow only to be rearrested again shortly thereafter. He died in a transit camp near Vladivostok in 1938.

After his second arrest, Mandelstam's wife, Nadezhda, led an almost nomadic life, dodging her expected arrest, frequently changing places of residence and temporary jobs. Her mission in life was to preserve and publish her husband's poems. She managed to keep most of them memorized because she did not trust paper.

Why all this trouble for a batch of poems about frost on windows, for example? Why do they matter? I think it's that when we read or hear words that aren't ordinary, that aren't what we expect, we wake up. Maybe only a little, but still, we're less susceptible to commercials, to jingoistic politics, to vague corporate language. Then, we're dangerous!

And also, when we read -- as in Mandelstam's poem -- "the sun squints at this starched poverty" -- see how much is packed there! Here's the frosted window, the sun shining through. It's as if it's been starched; the pattern's so stiff and flat it's barely anything. Yet it's like a forest. The eye sees frost and the mind's crunching through a forest. Yep, that's the way the mind works, but until someone takes us through it, we hardly realize it. It's a whole new experience that stretches the boundaries of who we are.

Would we die miserably, as William Carlos Williams says, without this poem? Is it miserable to die having only half lived, having lived inside the insulated cubicles of cliches all our lives? You decide.

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 record-eagle.com/onpoetry.

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Alone I stare into the frost's white face.
It's going nowhere, and I -- from nowhere.
Everything ironed flat, pleated without a wrinkle:
Miraculous, the breathing plain.
Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty --
The squint itself consoled, at ease ...
The ten-fold forest almost the same ...
And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread.

-- January 16, 1937

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