Aug 28, 2009

Beauty is way to play, not compete

by Anonymous

Marcus here. I’m filling in for L. L. this week on our poetry/culture posts. I promise to explain the creepy, cool doll picture in a minute.

First, I have to say that I love what the internet has done for poetry. Just ten years ago, I don’t think there were quite so many folks around the country taking a stab at poetry. Most of them were probably enrolled in MFA programs.

Not everyone loves poetry

The rest of America thought about poetry the way James C. Schaap’s students did. One day in his English class, he fell in love with his own reading of a poem. In Teachable Moments, he can’t quite remember which poem it is, maybe "The Chambered Nautilus" by Oliver Wendell Holmes. He tells the story like this:

…a month or so into my first teaching job, I'd become conscious of this odd talent I was somehow given: I could read stuff to kids and they'd be mesmerized, a talent I honestly didn't know I had. So I gave it my all, poured myself into the poem, read it--stem to stern--and looked up. They were perfectly mute.

"What do you think?" I said.

Nothing…

"It must be good," [one student] says. "because I don't understand it. That's the way it usually is in this class: if I don't get it, you love it. This one is good, right?"

I laughed, but he didn't. No one else did, in fact. As Hawthorne understood, a man who laughs alone is scary.

If people are afraid of poetry, it is only because of the way lovers of poetry sometimes act. Schaap's students knew he loved the poem. They didn’t get it, but they loved his enthusiasm. Schaap concludes, “I was, and ...literature could be snobbish and impenetrable… I understood immediately how this kid, Jeff, had created his own aesthetic, even though he didn't know the word: if he didn't understand a poem, he just assumed it was probably really good. That's what I'd taught him.”

Now, I think Schaap is being a little hard on himself about Jeff, but he makes a good point. Too often the world of poetry has created a false aesthetic. It values puzzles. It values code. It can feel snobbish, elitist, condescending, and worst of all completely irrelevant.

But everyone loves beauty

How did we let this happen? Beauty is never irrelevant. It is never elitist. Beauty is not something to be used against others.

But we do it all the time.

Church choirs turn into political hotbeds of competitive soloists, vying for the best part in the Christmas pageant musical.

Little League games turn into high pressure shouting matches as parents project professional sports onto eight year olds.

Even blogs, the ultimate literary playground, turn into bizarre attempts at monetizing and professionalizing ourselves.

We forget the gift. We forget to value the process of pursuing beauty. Instead, we indulge in the worst kind of competition, turning the whole world and all of our work into a farcical beauty pageant.

Beauty is way to play, not compete

We don’t have beauty contests here. Every Friday at HighCallingBlogs.com, we aren’t in competition with each other. We play. Even the professionals play here on Friday.

Sure, we feature some poems and not others, but everyone gets a link. Everyone gets some encouragement because we are all at different places in our pursuit of beauty. Some of us will revel in Jim Schaap’s mesmerizing skills of a poetry reader. Some of us will scratch our heads. Some of us are new to poems and writing and creative expression, but we try anyway. And there is beauty in the trying.

This week, I want to feature a beautiful poem by a friend of mine, John Poch. He has a new book available from Amazon or direct from the publisher Orchises Press. (They are old school with a mail-in order form. Awesome!) The poem is called "Superman." The book is called Dolls.

And everybody loves to play with dolls because dolls are beautiful, right?

SUPERMAN by John Poch

In our real-life adaptation of the movie,
the heroine who needs a helping hand,
my distraught daughter, lifts him, broken, to me.
What role do I play on this stage? The man

behind the curtain, best boy, grip, or gaffer?
Who’s saving whom from what? What’s Kryptonite?
The weight of sin in an action figure laugher?
What can I do for you, a type of the Christ,

for a heart surprisingly like ours: fun,
lonely, tempted by power and flattery,
susceptible to fate, love, and done.
Game over.
I replace your battery.

Doll, who am I above your resurrection:
a bird, a plane, your image, The Great Affection?

I'd love to hear feedback from people about John's poem in the comments today. Here are some questions this poem raised for me: What roles do we play with our children (if you have them) and friends (if you don't)? What role do we play with God? Jesus is more than a doll who just needs new batteries, we believe that, so why and how do we continue to cheapen his resurrection and grace?

Also try to visit some of the other beautiful, playful poems this week, many of them in response to L. L. Barkat's prompt about closets. I included a handful of one or two posts that just felt like they needed to be here even if they aren't exactly poems:

Divide Wisdom, MT by Dave
Quick Clips from the Slippery Issue of geez magazine
I Am [color] series at Love Notes to Yahweh
I do in sickness by Fred Sprinkle
The other girl by Fred Sprinkle
On nights like this by Milton Brasher-Cunningham
Psalm 66: Black Water and Crimson by Richard j.
Justice Exposed – Cindy Hanson
Magical Realms – Cindy Hanson
Skeletons in the Closet by Laura
Creative Writing Challenge Justice Edition at Bible Dude
Renewed—Nancy Kourmoulis
t h e . c l o s e t by nancy
spring cleaning by kelly
something less than purple by bkmackenzie
routine is good by redorgray
Closet by Yvette Massey
Testimony (in the closet) by Glynn Young
I am a rag doll by Claire
Fragrance by Monica Sharman
Comfort in the Rough by Monica Sharman
A short review of Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach by Byron Borger
Eve’s Second Garden by Marcus Goodyear
Found in the Closet by L.L. Barkat
Superman by John Poch
Thanks for waiting by Jim Schmotzer
Teachable Moments by James C. Schaap
Back Porch Refuge and Basement Closet Pirates by deb

For next week, try visiting one word several days in a row, to see if you can write a good poem in 60 seconds. (Special thanks to Ann Voskamp for pointing me to that site.) I played the one word game myself this morning at GoodWordEditing.com. And I look forward to seeing what the rest of you come up with. Maybe we can even get John to play...