Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

By Martin Farawell, Program Director
Dodge Poetry Program

This Saturday is that last day of National Poetry Month. It’s also the day that participants from throughout the state will mark the conclusion of Clearing the Spring, Tending the Fountain, our poetry groups for New Jersey teachers, by participating in a day-long poetry event that includes readings, discussions and workshops led by regional Dodge Poets and special guest Marie Ponsot.

So it seems natural to conclude National Poetry Month with our third installment on the Core Principles of Clearing the Spring, Tending the Fountain.

The third Core Principle, written by Jim Haba, Founding Director of the Dodge Poetry Program, reads: “Both listening/reading and speaking/writing are likely to be more creative and more alive if we approach them with what, in Zen practice, is called Beginner’s Mind.”

This notion of Beginner’s Mind is taken from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a collection of informal talks by Shunryu Suzuki, who, along with D. T. Suzuki (no relation) is largely credited with bringing Zen Buddhism to the United States. But you don’t need to be a student of Zen to understand Beginner’s Mind.

The essence of Beginner’s Mind is open-mindedness, a willingness to let go of old habits and assumptions, to approach every experience, even if it is one we have had many times before, as if this is the first time. It is to be open to possibilities, to re-experience the freshness we felt when we were true beginners.

It’s easy to imagine that such a frame of mind would change how we approach our everyday lives, but it can also liberate us from many of our ingrained ideas regarding how we approach the reading or writing of poetry.

Some of us turned away from poetry because we felt we had to be an expert to appreciate it. Perhaps we were taught that certain poems were “great” that did not move or speak to us. We might wonder why anyone cared about poems that left us cold, or fear that we were somehow lacking as readers who didn’t “get it.” At other times, we might be deeply moved by a poem, only to be told our interpretation was wrong. Sometimes it seemed that poems were like trick boxes, and only the teacher held the secret key that could unlock what a poem “really meant.” For some of us, the study of poetry was reduced to a guessing game: our opinion didn’t matter; we just had to figure out what our teacher thought.

But this feeling of alienation from poetry has nothing to do with our original, elemental, joyous connection to it. Infants, the truest of beginners, delight in playing with speech sounds even before they can say a single word. This “play” seems a crucial phase of language acquisition. “Baby talk” is full of rhyme, rhythm, repetition, melody, assonance and alliteration. We play with the building blocks of poetry before we have any notion of syntax. In this sense, poetry is our original form of speech.

Toddlers and young children will ask to hear the same nursery rhymes and poems again and again, even long after they’ve heard them often enough to know them by heart. Middle-schoolers will memorize the lyrics to dozens, if not hundreds of their favorite songs by the time they graduate high school. Left to our own devices, we are naturally drawn to poetry.

But if our experience studying poetry at some point made us feel inadequate as readers, it may be we are cutting ourselves off from one of humanities oldest and most basic pleasures.

Many years ago in Writing with Power, Peter Elbow observed that it is the critic in our minds, that aspect of ourselves that is constantly judging us, that gets in the way of our writing. We get blocked because we are editing and correcting what we are trying to write even before we put pen to paper. Elbow became one of many proponents of Free-writing, a writing exercise that encourages us to write quickly, without stopping to rethink, revise or correct what we’re writing. Free-writing has long offered one way to circumvent this interior critic: in free-writing, we decide to ignore this particular inner voice, no matter what it says. This has helped liberate many “stuck” writers, whether they were working on a play, a short story, a poem or a college essay. The beauty of this exercise is that we know we can always go back to the piece of writing later and let the critic do its work then.

Perhaps we can help ourselves to experience Beginner’s Mind in reading poetry by learning to practice something we might call Free-reading, that is, reading for the sake of reading, without any concern for, or investment in, the outcome.

We could start by acknowledging we also have an interior critic talking to us when we read. Just as when writing we can be inhibited by the fear that our writing is not good enough, so as readers our engagement with what we’re reading can be inhibited by fears that we are not good enough readers. How often do we blame ourselves for finding a work inaccessible or for not enjoying a work ranked high in this or that official canon?

Beginner’s Mind could mean simply being willing to enjoy a poem and staying with the experience of reading or hearing it, even if we do not understand it. There may be lines, images or sounds that amuse or captivate or move us, while other passages barely register. That’s fine. We can always return to the poem at a later date. Or not. We may decide not to give a particular poem any more attention. But we can’t discover any poems or new poets if we’re not willing to listen with an open mind. So let the last day of National Poetry Month not mark an ending, but the beginning of our rediscovering our Beginner’s Mind.

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To kick off National Poetry Month, we thought we would pay homage to the building blocks of poetry: really great lines.

Within each of us live words that we might not even realize are there, stored within us, ready at hand. When we connect deeply with a poem or a line, barriers are broken within us and the words become a sense memory that is meaningful. The rhythm syncs with us internally, and the meaning of impactful lines often seem to translate our own experiences.These lines can be the best type of haunting – coming to us in times of happiness, struggle…or even seemingly without any trigger at all. They can become mantras, small comforts, philosophies, themes. Most importantly – they can be shared.

Please share with us your most impactful lines from poetry; you may have them committed to memory, or you may feel compelled by them whenever you read them. These vital lines may be just what someone else needs too.

Post these favorite lines in the box below marked “Share your thoughts.”

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In the spirit of National Poetry Month, please consider a donation to the Dodge Poetry Program. Your generosity will help us continue to bring poets to schools around New Jersey, and to offer opportunities and materials for teachers.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Poet Heather McHugh has pointed out that in all the photographs of 9/11, none of the witnesses covered their eyes. Instead, they covered their mouths. Their bodies said what their words could not: What they were seeing was unspeakable.

In the days and weeks following, newspaper editorial offices across the country were swamped with poems. Long-experienced editors had never seen anything like it.

Where speech stops, where syntax shatters, where prose fails is where poetry begins.

When we are most profoundly moved, our syntax not only shatters, it shatters into rhythm. We stammer and stutter and repeat ourselves. Our language, illogical and irrational and emotional, is rhythmic and repetitious.

“I love you,” is prose: clear, simple, direct, and completely understandable, but utterly inadequate to the task of conveying profound love. The instant we start, as we inevitably do, to repeat ourselves out of awareness of the inadequacy of this language to convey our meaning—“I love you. I love you. I really really love you!”—we’ve fallen into rhythm and repetition.

In any extreme—of horror, mourning, terror or ecstasy—our speech becomes rhythmic. In our most primitive, pre-verbal responses, sobbing or laughing, our entire bodies are wracked by rhythm. Shakespeare understood this. Lear’s “Howl howl howl howl howl” as he cradles his dead daughter is likely the most perfectly natural line ever written.

And yet, rhythm has also always been the gateway to the spiritual realm. All spells, incantations, rituals, and prayers are rhythmic and repetitious. The goal of chanting, in a war dance, a rite of passage, or a celebration of the mass, is to influence or communicate with the higher power, even if, as in many meditation practices, the higher power sought is within us.

All these ancient rituals originated in a time when it was believed that breath is the source of inspiration because spirit and breath are one: We expire (exhale and die); we inspire (inhale and are filled with spirit). Spiritus, the Latin word for breath, is the root of spirit and inspiration.

But this direct experience of a higher power has always required what modern psychology would describe as a letting go of the ego: that is, of that formulation our consciousness has created and named the self. Our consciousness fights like the devil to avoid this letting go. It is frightening to explore who we are without our usual habits, fears and concerns, to go beyond the narrow limits of what we’re willing to know about ourselves. Who are we in the unknown, that place made entirely of our ignorance? Almost all mystical traditions are rooted in exploring this question, as are all the arts.

All ancient spiritual traditions used rhythm in some way. Somehow they understood to be set free of the self, we must step off into that deeper place rhythm opens up in us. That place is the source of our humanity, where we are both visceral and spiritual beings, where we discover that we are the unknown, that, as Melville wrote in White Jacket, “We ourselves are the repository of the great mystery.”

On the first anniversary of 9/11, a memorial concert was scheduled to be broadcast live from Liberty State Park, just across the river from where the Twin Towers had stood. Severe thunderstorms forced the cancellation of the concert. Instead, the film of the rehearsal was aired. With ground zero as a backdrop, the New Jersey Symphony played before an amphitheatre that contained almost exactly one empty seat for every person who had died.

As Verdi’s “Requiem” rose into the clear sky, I thought of all the hours the assembled musicians had to work to master their instruments—whole lifetimes devoted to music—and of all the hours they had to rehearse together to become a symphony. And then I thought of other lifetimes, those devoted to planning the murders of complete strangers. We are the creatures who make music. And make death.

To attempt to speak of this, to try to step outside of ourselves and understand why, is where poetry, theater, music, art begin.

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10
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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

The Favorite Poem Project launched by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky reminded us that the audience for poetry was much larger than many would have us believe. We discovered that tens of thousands of Americans, from all walks of life, have favorite poems they’ve carried with them through their lives, often committed to memory.

It’s easy to lose track of how pervasive a presence poetry is because for much of the time the poems that matter to us are carried “by heart” within us, where they are rarely heard by others. When we do give poems a voice, the audience is often small and intimate: we say them to a beloved, to friends or family, or to a gathering at our local café or library.

Because of this, we may be led to the false impression that few people care about poetry. But poetry circles, reading groups, workshops and open mics are in nearly every city, suburb and small town. In the tiny rural village where I now live, the two coffee shops in town have each run their own poetry reading series. Such gatherings might be small, but they are everywhere.

And poetry has been shared in small gatherings for tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. This is how it has been since before the development of written language, and how it will likely be for as long as human beings exist. The audience for poetry hasn’t diminished; it’s just that in the last century many of the other performance arts have reached the scale of spectacle.

Compared to a rock concert in Madison Square Garden, or the latest 3-D epic in an IMAX theater, a poetry reading can seem like a small event. But for much of human history theater and music were performed on a scale closer to that of a poetry reading. Before the invention of electronic amplification and Jumbotrons, their size was dependent upon the power of the human voice.

The poetry reading reminds us of that power, of the intimate experience of gathering together to listen closely to one another. There may never be a single poetry reading that packs Giants’ stadium as a Springsteen concert can, but there are easily as many people listening to poetry at the thousands of poetry readings happening on any given night.

So, to celebrate National Poetry Month, check your local paper and visit the nearest reading or open mic. There’s sure to be some listed. Or track down one of your favorite poems, perhaps one you haven’t revisited in years, and have your own poetry reading, even if the only audience is a beloved, or a friend, or yourself.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays and to visit our Poetry Festival website for news on the upcoming 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Nigerian-born poet and novelist CHRIS ABANI has said that poets were originally shamans and seers. What better way to launch Poetry Fridays in National Poetry Month than by honoring poetry’s deep roots in the oral tradition? Take a few moments to simply listen to Abani read his poems before reading further.

A video recording of a poetry reading eliminates one of the key differences between reading a poem on the page, where you have the luxury of rereading it as often as you wish, and hearing it at a live reading, where it goes by only once.

There is an ancient tradition, which some living poets also honor, of reciting the same poem more than once at a reading so it can be heard a second time. The video recording of Chris Abani gives you the opportunity to hear him read his poems two, three, or as many times as you’d like.

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