Poetry's vigor sometimes withers in study

When one of my readers recently asked if I'd be willing to look at some of her poetry, I felt obliged to inform her that poetry is not one of my strong points, if indeed I have any strong points.

I grew up in a male dominant culture that believed real men did not eat quiche and they didn't read poetry.

I don't remember being introduced to poetry in elementary school, other than that picked up on the playground:

Roses are red, violets are blue

Of this fact I know I'm right

I saw 'em hanging on the clothesline last night.

In the Air Force in the South Pacific I was thrown in with a more sophisticated crowd, mostly Yankees, and became a student of limericks such as:

There was a young woman from St. Paul

Who wore a newspaper dress to the ball.

While she was there, her dress caught fire

And burned her front page, sports section and all.

Then a studious fellow from Ohio introduced me to Roy J. Cook's "101 Famous Poems," and I decided that poetry might not be as unmanly as eating quiche after all.

Then came college. English lit. Poetry poured from every pore as profs passionately lectured at length on the works of such greats as Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Shelley and Keats.

Unfortunately, too many profs turn off young people to poetry by over-stressing "hidden meaning" in a poem. If a poet has something to say, he or she should say it in an understandable voice that does not leave us pondering what he or she meant. The young are not prone to linger long with obscure, unfathomable wordage.

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis who was addicted to cigars, once exasperated about the preoccupation with underlying meanings declared: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

But palatable poetry - dramatically, clearly and powerfully stated - is a thing of joy that speaks to us in a way that prose cannot. Lines become so enmeshed in our minds that we carry them through a lifetime. They become part of our thinking, our personality.

On the day of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, my wife was teaching senior English at Broughton High. When the awful news was announced on the intercom system, her students sat in stunned silence, some weeping openly. My wife instinctively reached for A.E. Housman's "To An Athlete Dying Young" and began reading the moving lines:

Now you will not swell the rout

Of lads that wore their honours out,

Runners whom renown outran

And the name died before the man.

Members of that English class still write or call my wife on the assassination anniversary.

Poetry abounds all around us. It is in a golfer's swing that sends a tiny white ball soaring for yards. It is in the way a pilot gracefully glides to earth a jetliner with 250 souls aboard. It's the innocence of a toddler reaching for a tulip just beyond his grasp.

A friend likes to drop lines of great poetry into his 8-year-old grandson's mind as they play or work together.

He quotes of Julius Caesar's distrust of sleek-headed men:

Let me have men about me that are fat;

Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights.

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;

He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

Now when young Will sees a bald-headed man, he is apt to say, "Look, Da-Da, a sleek-headed man. He has a lean and hungry look."

Thusly is planted seed of curiosity and sensitivity that leads to a lifetime appreciation of poetry.

No area of life is off limits to poets. Alfred Lord Tennyson obligingly reminds women involved with Romeos with roving eyes: "He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse."

My one and only poem on record was written while an impressionable college student, overcome by the devastating beauty of my first April in Chapel Hill:

Spring came late this year--

shyly, almost in winter's wake

She waited at woodland's door

in the grey house of the seasons.

Then Someone passed his hand over

the earth, set it afire with beauty.

The dogwood softly, blushed,

and Resurrection became a miracle

in the tulip beds.

Yeah, pretty awful, but I was young.

So, dear readers, especially you men, forgive me for leading you down this path of poetry, good and bad.

I hope you may have concluded that poetry isn't nearly as indigestible as quiche is reputed to be for "real men."