Snowy Evening

This week's selection (Goldbarth's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening) began with deciding to get a refreshed set of leads of current poetry. So, with some trepidation I picked up The Best American Poetry 2007.

The trepidation was due in part to my experience with some other sources of modern poetry. For instance, for a few years I kept up with the annual Walt Whitman and James Laughlin awards to publish a poet's first or second book. It was kind of depressing when some years I'm not sure if I would have classified any of the inclusions as even being "poetry", let alone being good poetry. (Its kind of like modern art... if you can't tell if its art or the scribbles of an elephant, three year old, or spilled paint can... is it really art. Now just do the same thing with a random phrase generator or grammar scrambler.)

On the other hand, looking over the list of past editors of this series, I saw the names of several poets whose work I had enjoyed at least some of - Mark Strand, Louise Glück, A.R. Ammons, Rita Dove, and Billy Collins. I also had a fondness for the old Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards books and Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse series. So, I jumped in.

Heather McHugh's introduction didn't begin particularly reassuringly Poetry attracted me in the first place, fifty years ago, because (half gasp half gape) it seemed constitutively thunderstruck, wonderstruck. The oddity and opportunity of verbal life seemed not just a poem's object but its fundamental subject: In a poem, theme and instrument could not be told apart. Except insofar as verve or the vernacular refresh it, daily life wants language chiefly for a tool of will, to note the sorely needed or the merely known. But as soon as systems of words are wielded by intentions only, predictable and paraphrasable, they being to bore me. A logophiliacal hunger craves amazement. And words can blaze!-most brightly where (like fires) their logs are interlaid with airs. They can flow-or flock-or fluster! From their arrangement in measures, uncontainability pours forth... (And so it is with us: We can't contain ourselves). I'll take the second sentence of this first paragraph just fine... the rest, well my taste in introductions runs a little more contained. This one gave me a fear that I would find a volume of verbal paint splatterings or word games.

I was pleasantly surprised. Having gone through all 75 of the poems twice now (and some several more times than that), I have 8 in my volume (including this week's selection) currently with marks for rereading for possible future use (although none stepped up and demanded inclusion). A very quick count just now gives me 16 that I have trouble imagining even a good devil's advocate argument in favor of being quality poetry (suffering from bouts of random word splatter or word-gaminess in many cases), and 2 that I thought were fine, but I'm not sure why they would be prose-poetry instead of just prose. The other 49 were somewhere in the middle, ranging from "I wouldn't call them good, but can imagine someone might" to "ok". Its perhaps depressing, but those numbers aren't out of line with what I'm used to from the Borestone or Magazine series (although those typically had one or two that jumped out as definite keepers), and this was certainly a better ratio than I find in lots of collections by individual poets these days. (There are some good quotes around by some fairly well known poets on how good poetry is a rare thing that I guess will have to be the subject of a later post.)

As to this particular poem, one reason for inclusion is the subject matter. I think poems, like most things in life, can resonate due to individual circumstances. I spent several long nights over the past two weeks in a city much more wintery than home working to get papers ready for a conference. I'm also a fond of a good last line, and I think this one has a good one. (I'm not in favor of having copyright protected poetry live forever in blogdom, but your local library or bookstore should have a copy to read if it isn't up on the current selection page.)