This time of year always reminds me of poetry.
In the ninth grade, our English teacher gave my classmates and me an assignment: we were to write a poem describing a fall scene using a variety of poetic devices. I, like most others, wrote the poem quickly and easily, filling it with brilliantly colored skirts being tossed in the fall winds -- a wild can-can joyfully celebrating blue skies, crisp air, and the coming of a new season.
And most of the other poems were filled with drivel just like mine. All but one. My best friend, Beth, wrote her poem about death. A good poem. She didn't write about the leaves, she didn't create metaphors to describe the air or personify a rake. She wrote about silence. About vulnerability. About pain and eventual rebirth.
Our vastly different perceptions of autumn became a joke between us, and throughout high school, we'd look at the window and make morose comments about the impending winter.
Now for another opinion about poetry and poets, from a person who does not necessarily enjoy it. Diana Athill, the longtime literary editor at Andre Deutsch, wrote this in her memoir, Stet:
"...And poets, although they do have a twist to their nature which non-poets lack, which enables them to produce verbal artifacts of superior intensity, are not superior beings. In the distant days when they were singing stories to their fellows in order to entertain and instruct them, they were useful ones; in those days when they devised and manipulated forms in which to contain the more common and important human emotions they were clever and delightful ones; and in the comparatively recent days when they have examined chiefly their own inner landscapes they have often become boring ones (I have stopped reading the Independent's 'Poem of the Day' because of how distressingly uninteresting more of them are). And even when the poems are not boring, the poet can be far from superior...!"
And most of the other poems were filled with drivel just like mine. All but one. My best friend, Beth, wrote her poem about death. A good poem. She didn't write about the leaves, she didn't create metaphors to describe the air or personify a rake. She wrote about silence. About vulnerability. About pain and eventual rebirth.
Our vastly different perceptions of autumn became a joke between us, and throughout high school, we'd look at the window and make morose comments about the impending winter.
Now for another opinion about poetry and poets, from a person who does not necessarily enjoy it. Diana Athill, the longtime literary editor at Andre Deutsch, wrote this in her memoir, Stet:
"...And poets, although they do have a twist to their nature which non-poets lack, which enables them to produce verbal artifacts of superior intensity, are not superior beings. In the distant days when they were singing stories to their fellows in order to entertain and instruct them, they were useful ones; in those days when they devised and manipulated forms in which to contain the more common and important human emotions they were clever and delightful ones; and in the comparatively recent days when they have examined chiefly their own inner landscapes they have often become boring ones (I have stopped reading the Independent's 'Poem of the Day' because of how distressingly uninteresting more of them are). And even when the poems are not boring, the poet can be far from superior...!"
The sweet sound of silence.
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