Marcus Austin

Flour, Cheese, and Tomatoes—Mostly

It is the material element of language that makes poetry powerful, because art must have a medium—otherwise it is powerless. Adrienne Rich contemplated “language as material force” (xvi). Language in a vacuum has no power, it has no facility to change the world, but the poet has the ability to let the language drape over his hands like pizza dough, and with a gentle flick and some momentum the dough can rise and spin, becoming something more than it was before. The dough starts as base material, but thanks to the craft of the pizza maker those materials become something almost magical—the odor of the pizza can call forth meanings from deep within the brain of whoever gets a whiff of it; its sight, its taste and touch all bring forth rushes of memory and send electricity coursing through new and old neural pathways in the beholder.  Poetry, made up of the base materials of the universe, human experience and language, has to be crafted carefully and skillfully by an artist who knows how to use all of the raw material of poetry to create art.

But, most people don’t have the conception of pizza as being painfully overcomplicated, and out of reach for most people of average intelligence. Poetry, on the other hand, has suffered from the experimentation of the twentieth century—a period where “the reading public lost touch with poetry when modern poets lost touch with their audience” (Astley 27). The poetry section at most books stores is paltry and tucked away, and considering that most people’s conception of poetry is outdated by decades and often centuries, it is no wonder that poetry struggles to find a wider audience—there is an audience though. An audience is what makes poetry worth something; the connection between human beings through language is part of what makes us human.

In a world where people are bombarded by the dirge of language spewed from dirt and detritus caked televisions, cell phones, radios, and computers, poets and their poetry must take their stand against the uses of language which degrade us as a species. Oscar Wilde wrote that “all art is quite useless” (cite), but poetry is both useless and useful. If poems have the power to reclaim language from oppressors, propagandists, and texting teenagers—in other words preserve and progress the language— then poetry is not useless. But, the effect that modern society and its short, episodic bursts of language has had, and will continue to have on future generations, is that we have become a people who desire instant gratification from our language. “Your life could be in danger! Watch the news at six o’ clock” says the concerned looking anchor man; this forced gap between such a spurt of language and its deeper meaning exists to entice the viewer into seeking its deeper meaning by watching the news later because such language is disposable; it needs a hype-man because after it is consumed that is all there is—nothing left. Poems cannot give a teaser at three o’ clock, they cannot dangle a carrot over the head of the reader; all they can do is exist on the page, and thus they are not disposable. They deserve to be read critically—and more than once.

Stephen Minot says that “when you read a poem critically, you adopt that poet as your teacher” (139). A recent psychological experiment determined that dogs and babies up to about four to five months old, if having seen a human place a toy in one (A) of two bins (A and B) repeatedly, will always check the bin that the toy has previously been put in (A), even if they observe the toy being put in bin B. Wild dogs, such as wolves, do not do this, and babies learn not do this at a certain age; they will go straight to the bin where they saw the toy being placed by the human (B), regardless of how many times they have seen the toy being placed in bin A by the human before. This is because dogs and young babies see the human as a teacher. As adult humans, like wolves, we tend to seek what we want where we can see that it is, but if a poet becomes a teacher when we read critically, then aren’t we liable to keep looking to poetry, even when we think we see the answer somewhere else? Yes, that’s why poetry will never go away; there are things that can only be learned through poetry, even when we see those things all around us.

“The essence of poetry is . . . an interplay of thought and feeling expressed through the sound and rhythm of language” (Astley 463). Thought and feeling are ever-present in the living, and thus our humanity begs us to understand. Poets can help us understand our humanity by writing poetry to share with other readers. When a person hears a poem it is a “material force”, the same way that a radio can make the bones of you inner ear jiggle to the art of the musician. What most people forget about poetry is that “none of this is easy, and [its] not supposed to be “.  Poetry, causing some sort of “Intensity of experience”, “requires high standards of quality control”. The poet cannot simply “shout and emote”; instead there must be “consistency, unity, management of tone, change, shifts” and there is “plenty to criticize because there’s so much to get right, and anything wrong sticks out” (White lyric.htm). When we learn to look to poetry for intense experiences, we want to look for poetry which has a quality to it.

If all poetry were just twee bumble grams written lovingly and filled with effervescent dreams of one day gracing a Hallmark card, then men and women would not have been drawn “to this genre since before there were written languages” (1). And what has drawn us to poetry is the exceptional qualities of exceptional poetry; “as readers, we have come to expect these qualities unconsciously”, but “as writers, however, that vague sense is not enough” (1).

What we seek from poetry has to be put there by the author—the teacher.  If every poem were a deceptive, overly intertextual, labyrinth of sonic inhumanity, then poetry would not be much fun at all, but there is a need for craft. Authors who have studied the craft, and can recognize those things that a poem lacks, that it needs, in order to become a powerful force and transcend the rotting landfill of disposable, ignoble language, can create poetry which touches our senses and teaches us something about the human experience that otherwise couldn’t have been transmitted. A poem which exists, especially a good one, exists because there is no other way of expressing what is in the poem; such a poem can nourish with the same intensity of experience as the finest pizza parlor in Napoli.

Works Cited

Astley, Neil. Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times. 2nd. New York, NY: Miramax Books, 2003. Print.

Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002. Print.