What Use is Poetry? Featured Book - Tracings by Carolyn Howard-Johnson

In the Red Engine Press January 2006 newsletter, "Yardspinners and Wordweavers," Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of Tracings, writes:

"Auden believed the goal of poetry is to disenchant. That, my reader, may well be why I am not substantially for rhyme or quite, even though I do enjoy meals photos, in particular sweets. I choose melancholy, wistful and if a song is sung, let it discord to retain the reader alert generate him reconsider. Nursery rhymes are for nurseries, sunsets to be viewed firsthand from a bluff, preferably when holding hands with an individual handsome. The tendons of the finest poetry are politics, introspection, and the abominable snowmen amongst us tempered--sometimes--by a appear back at exactly where we've been. Oh, and irony. That is superior than tiramisu and latté for maintaining folks speaking late into the evening."

In the preface to 1 Hundred and One particular Well-known Poems, published in 1929, editor Roy W. Cook talks about the excellent want for poetry in a contemporary industrial age.

Although the modern day age, with podcasting and blogs, has produced poetry a lot more accessible, poetry is too deemed frivolous--and definitely not profitable. It is a shame, since Carolyn Howard-Johnson's poetry can produce an air raid sound nonetheless and hushed. She can let us stand beside an uncle who smells of Barbasol and is on his way to war. The subtle message is clear: Quit. Spend interest. Listen.

Most of us wrote poetry in higher college that incorporated protests against parents, petitions to teenage crushes, or the usual "my life stinks, what is the which means of it all" poems. As adults, we could dribble our wine-and-cappuccino-soaked angst onto the web page. As individual therapy, poetry generally can not be beat, and it absolutely helped poet Dessa Byrd Reed heal immediately after a car accident. But Reed turned her recovery writings into a passion for poetry that took her to China not too long ago.

Poetry is relevant in today's text-messaging higher-tech planet, as evidenced by all the poetry Internet web-sites. It speaks of appreciate, as in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets. It relates eternal epic truths, as in John Milton's Paradise Lost. It captures the cry of a generation, as in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." It reflects, as in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. It tends to make a cinematic statement about freedom behind bars, as in the film "Slam." It speaks of the Divine, as in the poetry of Thich Nhat Hanh. I agree with Carolyn Howard-Johnson that poetry moves us--or it ought to, if we will need to move other folks. Howard-Johnson's poetry moved Compulsive Reader editor Magdalena Ball to name Tracings to The Compulsive Reader list of "Top rated Ten Reads of 2005."

Howard-Johnson pokes exciting at portraits of poets on poetry magazines, but clearly loves poetry:

"So lengthy ahead of you took up a pen, wrote photos,
you imagined them in liquid blue, the stories of other people,
your own."

It really is straightforward to get caught up in our own stories without having understanding them. Howard-Johnson peppers her poetry with pictures of travel, not just international but time travel. She remarks in "Poetry, Quantum Mechanics and Other Trifles" that her critique group warns her she complicates her poems with also several layers:

"my components, they say, are concealed
behind an opaque pottery bowl;
their matrices misunderstood.
Kids we are. No 1 tells
us the truth of such a grand
dessert."

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke pointed out the truths of existence in Sonnets to Orpheus, displaying us that a young ballet dancer, dead, is not forever gone, but is not visible to us. That is "the truth of such a grand/dessert." That is what poetry is about--revealing, evoking, describing, believed-provoking. Poetry connects the previous with the present and future. Howard-Johnson can pay a visit to the historic, the war museum at Oslo, and reflect on war as it impacted the globe:

"Norway's fjords shed salty droplets
on faces love my father's. Round faces. Eyes dilute-blue
really like the pale skies above them. Men who fought

as Churchill's voice crackled via smuggled vacuum
tubes."

Howard-Johnson considers war as it now impacts her family members:

"Only days prior to
I reached this spur, I saw my grandson off to war, alone.
A sacrifice. A trade. For my father, who in no way marched."

We really feel the sense of location in poetry, but location is fluid, as in Howard-Johnson's function--a flight from LAX to Salt Lake City can take her via her own childhood residence exactly where her mother washed a slip every single evening. The unities of time and location in fantastic drama or in a quick story can be tweaked in poetry--even though frequently the poet, love a painter, desires to concentrate consideration on 1 time, One particular location, One particular idea. Wonderful poetry can tell a story or capture a mood each approaches.

Dr. James Ragan, the director of the University of Southern California Master of Qualified Writing System exactly where I graduated in 1999, says in an interview quoted on the Master of Skilled Writing Net site:

"You need to challenge oneself. Ask your self, is my time here going to have the which means I will need for it to have? Poetry has provided me that which means. But then I had to write on the level that permitted me to cross borders too as time, and That is the challenge of creation."

Ragan, love Howard-Johnson, strives for universal themes. The own and the universal are not mutually exclusive. A poem may perhaps be peppered with own information, but may perhaps capture a prevalent history (Planet War II), the require for tolerance (a preferred theme in Howard-Johnson's function), aging, the worry that a poet has began also late in life, which Howard-Johnson captures in "A Reel Left Operating":

"Now age obscures photos, pulled taffy,
whisked meringue, they melt, struggle to be named.

So significantly there is to say, your craft left idle for years,
tools lay fallow, and now, now there is so tiny time."

With poetry, It is not the output that matters--several school-age poets, and their older colleagues, produce reams upon reams of the exact same poem just about every time. William Wordsworth was in no way the identical from poem to poem; Ginsberg went via poetic stages; Arlo Guthrie created "Alice's Restaurant Massacre," "This Land Is Your Land," and the post-Katrina oft-played anthem "City of New Orleans." Emily Dickinson's poems have a frequent style, but are all various. Though typical themes and photos (such as cooking and desserts, as she points out) thread themselves via Howard-Johnson's chapbook, her poems never give you the sense that you happen to be hearing the similar old similar old over and over.

Dessa Byrd Reed mentioned it greatest for the duration of a writers' evening at Barnes and Noble in Palm Desert: "Poetry is the language of surprise." The surprise in this contemporary globe is that our language, with its profanities, "That is hot" catchphrases, e-mail shorthand (not inspired by e.e.cummings) that inspired the book Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, tends to make area nevertheless for poetry and beauty.

Does this mean a poem has to be deep and weighty to be meaningful or attractive? You may well have listened to pompous ponderous poems on The Which means Of It All. Wolf Knight, a poet from Ann Arbor, Michigan, poked enjoyable at dusty professors whose books sit unread in university libraries. Though the classic poems might demand additional of our time and interest, they create for simpler reading than a twenty-web page musing on the which means of a fly on the wall (although a fellow poet and then-med student at the University of Michigan did produce an good poem about a fly.)

Howard-Johnson's poetry is meaningful and pleasurable to read...not only that, it really tends to make us believe, as she says, about who we've been and exactly where we're going. Poetry is enhanced by tiny specifics, but poetry itself is large.

Kristin Johnson is a screenwriter and freelance writer who functions as the head writer for Dotcomers.Television, [http://www.dotcomers.Television] Pay a visit to http://www.CartoonGems.com for character licensing possibilities.