Ryan Smith 

Dresden

            Immediately upon reading the course definition of lyric poetry, I began to analyze my own work and question its integrity as a lyric poem. Does it leave a “single, unified impression?” Is it “essentially melodic?” And though my amateur poem is no “high example,” does it “partake…of the quality of ecstasy?” If each requirement for lyric poetry is taken literally and objectively, then “To Eat And To Drink And To Be Merry” is a lyric poem more by default – it simply doesn’t fit into the other existing categories – then by strict adherence to criterion. By examining my prior experience with poetry, and insights gained thus-far in this course, a better understanding of lyric poetry, and my poem’s place within it, can, perhaps, be found.

            My first encounters with poetry were probably no different than mot of my fellow classmates; nursery rhymes, lullabies, and children’s songs were abundant and helped introduce rhyme, rhythm and melody to young ears. Later, parents, relatives, and teachers would play the radio – or turn on the television – and popular songs, “somewhat rawer or cruder or more obvious”, than written-poetry, would play. If not for a mother sensitive to poetry and fiction, contemporary popular music would have most likely been my only experience with poetry until being forced to learn about and read it in progressing levels of grade school. But my mother loves Robert Frost, and Emily Dickenson, among others – predictable, but valuable choices; because of her, fairly early in my life, I learned to appreciate the more challenging, and, by comparison with music on the radio, unpopular arts. Popular song was still an unavoidable influence, as each clique fostered their own musical tastes, and I found myself writing ridiculously self-indulgent and sappy poetry, worthy of nothing but wooing over-emotional teenage girls – written by an over-emotional teenage boy, of course. Since then I’ve learned to glean what I deem as worthwhile lyrics from popular music; for example, take these lyrics from a song entitled “The Flame Deluge” by an American rock band called Thrice:

I know that I was meant for something more.
My curse, this awful power to unmake.
And ever since you found your taste for war,
You’ve forced me onto those whose life you'd take.

While Guernica in peaceful valley lay,
And Dresden dreamed of anything but death,
The day was turned to night and night to day.
You let me loose upon their fragile flesh.

And so I hid among the smallest things.

You found me there and ferried me above.

The flame deluge is waiting in the wings.

The smallest thread holds back the second flood.

And who will stand to greet the blinding light?
It's lonely when there's no one left to fight.

The song – it is an actual song recorded and released on an album – is an English sonnet, I believe. In fact, that album, entitle The Alchemy Index, has four parts, each ending with a similar sonnet; this sort of thing was and is my musical standby, but only last semester, I broadened my experience with Dr. McCall’s poetry class.

            Under McCall’s guidance, the class read and discussed a variety of modern and contemporary poems from the last century. Everything from E. E. Cummings, to my mother’s favorite, Robert Frost, was covered. From our first reading assignment I was struck by the challenge of understanding and fully grasping what I was reading. Lines didn’t make sense, stanzas were oblique, entire poems were confusing. But I learned, through lengthy group discussions, and by writing essays about said poetry, how to better navigate the art; some poems were meant to simply be a careful crafting of words that creates and image, others, a play on words themselves; some poems were a re-imagining of older ideas and philosophies, molded to fit the complexities of modern life. The poems were fine, my way of reading them changed. I’m still challenged by poetry of all eras – to me, it’s the most difficult and complex written art – but I’m also finding opportunities, such as this class, to deepen my skill at reading and creating lyric poetry.

            Replacing the well-established poets and poems of my earlier poetry class are short excerpts from a textbook on the basics of writing, reading and understanding poetry; there are also original works from my peers to be tactfully criticized. Among the assigned reading assignments, I found various pieces of information that not only helped improve my general knowledge and skill with lyric poetry, but directly related to my own works. Most of my poems are done in free-verse – although I certainly didn’t know the technical specifics of what I was doing when I first began writing – so I found chapter eight, “Free-verse Patterns,” to be especially useful. The introduction to the chapter explains the ways in which free-verse is still poetry: “Free from regular rhyme schemes, free verse draws instead on a number of different auditory devices…It occasionally employs scattered rhymes. Most important, it almost always maintains some type of rhythm.” This information, expounded on in more depth as the chapter progresses, helped me construct my required poem for the class; I realized that I wasn’t bound by traditional structures for lyric poetry, yet I knew that I needed repetition, occasional rhyme, etc. to make the poem work, to make sure I didn’t fall into putting surreal prose into arbitrary lines and stanzas. Another slice of reading I found interesting and helpful was chapter three, “Where Poems Come From,” specifically the section on ambivalence. When I ran across the sentence, “With ambivalence…two conflicting emotions or attitudes occur simultaneously,” I was impressed; I love to read poems in which opposites of emotion, morality, etc. are juxtaposed – perhaps I could write one in which this happened. Another line further down ends the section on ambivalence: “Every evil, after all, has its secret appeal,” and although I don’t think I was consciously thinking of this line as I wrote my poem, I’m convinced it played itself out through the everyday gluttony of my poem.

            Every poetry workshop in class sheds new light on what makes poetry readable, difficult or enjoyable, not only to oneself, as the author, but to an audience, which is the ultimate goal of writing for many – having others read, appreciate and learn from work that originated within you. Understanding the basics of lyric poetry is essential before the next step, creating and sharing poetry with others, and the rarer final step of publication. I hope that my experience in this class gives me the ability, not to become a praised and well known poet, or to gain some kind of financial success based on writing (highly unlikely), but to appreciate and read lyric poetry better, and to be able to create something of myself, but not for myself.