Poetry is for Keeping
Poetry is for keeping
You up late at night,
Red eyes staring into blue light
And the words represented in
Electrons that sing
Like dying swans are
Simply giving it their darnedest
To become much more than martyrs
To some other writer's lost cause.
Poetry is for keeping
Our husks alive and
Well-fed; we savor couplets
And relish the punch of a haiku,
The wine of a psalm is refreshing
And a sonnet is good bread
For bodies that are calculated,
Observable, finitely there
To behold and to be gone.
Poetry is for keeping
Before it is for sharing,
'Cause sharing's not caring
When what's there isn't very
Anything to anyone,
It's gotta keep you first in
Its newborn unedited hands
To even have some kind of a chance
To blot gray days with color.
Posted Apr 2, 2017, 11:18 AM UTC
815
I like the structure and rhythm, rhymes are not burdensome (which is a thing I often think about when reading rhymed poetry), and the poem flows smoothly. But it doesn't sing to me, and does not resonate. I think the reason is rather simple-the narrator seems to be talking to me, it's written in second person perspective, and as soon as it starts getting the details wrong about my relationship to poetry, I become disconnected and doubtful. And this begins immediately, in the first stanza:
"Poetry is for keeping
You up late at night,"
That barely happens to me. I am a morning/early afternoon poet. The poem stops talking to me almost as soon as the dialogue is initiated. But in the second stanza I am able to reconnect with the narrator because the metaphors aren't personal anymore, and perhaps this has to do with shifting the pronoun to the first person, an inclusive "we". And the neat observation about impermanence of physical bodies is interesting, this is the strongest stanza and it works for me, meaning it pulls me back in and resonates.
Things again become distancing in the final stanza, on account of the narrator returning to the second person perspective and the saccharine:
" 'Cause sharing is not caring
When what's there isn't very
Anything to anyone"
Point taken, and it is an interesting argument, but executed in a cheesy manner. By the time I read the last line I am too distant from the poem to care.
What I think maybe an interesting experiment here is to try subbing "you" for "I", because really the narrator speaks about their own relationship to poetry. I think there is a tendency to shy away from the first person narrative in poems because so much "I" can seem repetitive and boring and overused, but what first person narrative does in the poem is make it intimate and relatable, whereas the second-person perspective, while capable of being a powerful tool in a poet's arsenal, serves to distance a reader from connecting to the poem emotionally when the narrator gets the "you" of the reader wrong(and here I mean all sorts of emotions: liking he poem, hating it, feeling sad about it, etc. The worst thing a poem can accomplish is to remain completely silent to its intended audience). Here is a version I can imagine:
Poetry keeps me up at night
Red eyed staring into blue light ... etc etc.
In my mind the gates into the poem here are very much open and inviting, and most importantly relatable, not because I stay up late writing poetry, but because I understand the image and can relate to it in ways other than having directly experienced it.
Thanks for the thorough feedback! Haven't thought about making it first person as opposed to second person, I'll try toying around with that. I want to keep the motif/idea of 'poetry is for keeping,' however, as that phrase and the different places I can take it were my starting point.
Oh good point! I completely overlooked the importance of that mechanism. I like it too, you should absolutely keep it!