I Think I am Going to Like “Beautiful & pointless,” David Orr’s New Book about Modern Poetry

I started the book just about an hour ago over pork souvlaki at one of the diners around the corner from where I teach, and I didn’t get very far. I am tired and I also had to read in preparation for class–which, ironically enough, is ENG 102, Introduction to Literature. We’re not doing poetry right now, though, so what David Orr has to say is not immediately relevant to what I have to say to my students (We are starting Women Without Men by Shahrnoush Parsipour.) Still, I enjoyed the introduction to his book, which was all I had the time and energy to read, immensely–especially his discussion of how it makes sense to talk to general readers about poetry:

When a nonspecialist audience is responding well to a poem, its reaction is a kind of tentative pleasure, a puzzled interest that resembles the affection a traveler bears for a destination that both welcomes and confounds him. For such readers, then, it’s not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone [referring to what Orr sees as the two dominant modes of response to modern poetry that one finds in books on the subject]. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium.

I did not laugh outloud when I read that–I was, after all, in a diner and there were people around me enjoying their meals–but I laughed inwardly, both because I knew where he was going and because I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to go there with him. I don’t know that I think Poetry: The Undiscovered Country is the best way to talk to “nonspecialist” readers about modern poetry, but I do know that I liked the ride Orr’s exploration of his metaphor took me on:

The comparison may seem ridiculous at first, but consider the way you’d be thinking about Belgium if you were planning a trip there. You might try to learn a few useful phrases, or read a little Belgian history, or thumb through a guidebook in search of museums, restaurants, flea markets, or promising-sounding bars. The important thing is that you’d know you were going to be confused, or at least occasionally at a loss, and you’d accept that confusion as part of the experience. What you wouldn’t do, however, is become paralyzed with anxiety because you don’t speak fluent Flemish, or convinced that to really “get” Belgium, you need to memorize the Brussels phone book. Nor would you decide in advance that you’d never understand Belgians because you couldn’t immediately determine why their most famous public statue is a depiction of a naked kid peeing in a fountain (which is true). You’d probably figure, hey, that’s what they like in Belgium; if I stick around long enough, maybe it’ll all make sense.

There is so much that is dead on about this, from the way people do treat poetry like a foreign language you can’t understand unless you’re already fluent to the assumption that not understanding a single image in a poem means you should just throw your hands up in resignation and never read another one; and I like the humor here; and there’s not really much else that I have to say, especially since I need to go teach in three minutes, except that I am looking forward to reading the rest of the book. Orr sounds like the kind of critic with whom it will be good to have the kind of conversation you can only have in the act of reading, and I miss reading poetry and reading good books about poetry just for the pleasire of it, just because I am a poet and this stuff feeds me.

Off to class.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.