Grim's Hall

Poetry:

Poetry is dead, writes Bruce Wexler in Newsweek. Why?

Anyone can write a bad poem. To appreciate a good one, though, takes knowledge and commitment. As a society, we lack this knowledge and commitment. People don�t possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold. They aren�t willing to let the words wash over them like a wave, demanding instead for the meaning to flow clearly and quickly. They want narrative-driven forms, stand-alone art that doesn�t require an understanding of the larger context. I, too, want these things. I am part of a world that apotheosizes the trendy, and poetry is just about as untrendy as it gets.

Well, we have come again to "rolling back the 20th century." The kind of poetry Wexler means is the kind he mentions by name in the article--�I Knew a Woman� by Theodore Roethke, Eliot�s �Prufrock." This 20th century poetry is surpassingly arrogant. It demands that your read it twenty times to begin to appreciate it with all the self-surety of an archbishop presenting his ring.

Not so the older forms, especially the epic forms. Highly developed poetic forms rest upon strength of imagery, the ability to grab you and move you viscerally. The arcane twists and turns of such forms--skaldic kennings, for example--arise only because the forms themselves are so enticing. People read Homer twenty times, a hundred times, not because they want to appreciate Homer. They read and reread him because they do appreciate Homer. From the first time you hear it read, the old oral epics grab you by the throat. The Iliad describes the hunger of the Myrmidon's, Achilles' heroes, as they enter the war at last:

Hungry as wolves that rend and bolt raw flesh, hearts filled with battle-frenzy that never dies--off on the cliffs, ripping apart some big-antlered stag they gorge on the kill till all their jaws drip red with blood, then down in a pack they lope to a pooling, dark spring, their lean sharp tongues lapping the water's surface. . . .

So the Myrmidons, arranged as they were about Patroclus, Achilles' friend and doomed to die.