Strong Stuff

Yesterday turned out to be something of a landmark day for me in terms of my experience of reading poetry. It's not unusual for me to encounter moments of remarkable intensity in reading poems, points at which poems seem to blaze and dazzle, points at which the entirety of a poem seems to lock together in an overwhelming unity that transcends its individual moments - such that the experience is greater than a 'point' but appears to condense into one. This doesn't happen every day, which is a relief as, whilst it's highly enjoyable in its way, it's also in some ways disturbing - as if opening a door onto a world that's just a bit too intense in which to reside for any length of time.
 
Yesterday this happened to me three times, twice in the classroom, and then at home in the late evening.
 
In retrospect these intensities had been presaged by some of my reading on Monday evening. That was when I suddenly realised what William Carlos Williams was up to his longish early poem The Wanderer. This concludes Al Que Quiere!, but there's a somewhat earlier version of the poem (I think from 1914) that he revised for the later collection of 1917. Since I'm reading through the Collected sequentially, I'd read the 1914 version some days previous, but with little in the way of insight. Then I found myself re-reading the poem, now comparing the two versions which are similar but with some interesting revisions. I suppose this closer reading helped result in my realisation that the poem is essentially one of initiation, with WCW finding his real subject, the America he intimately knew through his wanderings as a doctor, the old woman he encounters in the poem being his muse (and grandmother). It's so obvious, and I'd missed it completely. And I also realised the extent to which it's the voice of Whitman in the background of the poem and that Whitman is in many ways the dominating influence on early Williams - rather than Pound. Anyway, the poem came satisfyingly alive for me, as if I'd been initiated into something.

Then in two quite separate lessons in the course of Tuesday, poems that I know well, one very well indeed, sprung to visceral life for me in readings aloud, one in a completely unintended almost accidental manner. This left me by the late afternoon in some small way reflecting upon the nature of poetry, which, in turn, led me in the evening to look up the Poem of the Week page in the Guardian-on-line. Carol Rumens makes great choices and provides wonderfully insightful commentaries, and the accompanying Comments are nearly always as readable as what's above the line, so I was looking forward to a good read as usual, and in my somewhat 'enhanced' state of mind I suppose I was even more receptive to having a good time than on a typical visit.

As it was, the poem featured, Barry MacSweeney's Daft Patter, took the top of my head off, just when I would have preferred a bit of gentle calm. Apart from being an obviously wonderful poem its concerns spoke so directly to me that it was uncanny. As Mum would have said, it all felt a bit much. 

I've avoided reading any poetry at all today.