Reading Stonehenge

“That poetry is akin to madness doesn’t show up until a much later screen.” Anita Sullivan

The Highest Cauldron

By Anita Sullivan

EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—11/4/2013—My husband is the poets’ ideal: he reads poetry but doesn’t write it.

Why are people like him not more numerous in the world? Much more numerous. More to the point, why are the people who read, listen to, and buy poetry books almost inevitably the same people who write the stuff? It’s not that way with fiction, auto mechanics, plumbing, or bronze sculpturing, to name a few other pursuits.

All right, there are over seven billion people on earth and, though poets are thought to be a minority among these numbers, it all depends on what you mean by “a poet,” doesn’t it? Everybody can be a lover, a cook, a singer (my tongue’s in my cheek here) —and every human being probably harbors at least one lingering, unbearable grief. But poetry is an art, for crying out loud. You can’t just write any old thing, call it a poem, do this a few more times, and add “poet” to your resume.

My husband, as Reader of Poems, accompanies me to poetry readings, to launching parties, to workshops, and openly relishes the experience. He doesn’t mind if I invite poets to dinner, and he takes part in those endless nit-picky conversations about the merits of various techniques. He will read any new draft I put before him, without wincing and, from our private conversations, I inevitably emerge—if not with greater skill, at least with a renewed understanding and readiness.

This is not surprising in itself; it’s only when I regard the matter statistically that my brow begins to furrow. After all, if most readers of poetry also double as writers, many of them must be perennial beginners in the craft who fail to stick with the practice to the point where it starts to get hard. But meanwhile, they’re buying books, attending classes and conferences, composing verse, and happily dabbling in whatever passes as “poetry” in the common arena. Their role as readers is valuable, even if they have merely poked one toe into the water.

Poetry does begin with “P” which rhymes with “T” which stands for Trouble, but writing boiler plate poems is not likely to lead back to the “P” that stands for Perdition.

That poetry is akin to madness doesn’t show up until a much later screen.

My husband, who is primarily a music historian and translator, remains steadfast in his role as reader-only of poetry. Recently, after he went carefully through my first draft of a poem that came out of our visit to Stonehenge, we had a short conversation:

Ted: If I were writing a poem about that trip to Stonehenge (and you will be pleased to know that I will do no such thing), I think I would talk about the people who built it. That’s what really intrigues me. How did they move those enormous stones?

Anita: Yes, that intrigues me, too, though that’s not what I did. What would you say?

Ted: Well, I might wonder how many people it took for one stone . . .

Anita: (interrupting, as usual) . . . and why they wanted to do this in the first place?

Ted: Yes, yes, of course. Was it for ancestor worship, or for some astronomical purpose? And, how did they actually transport the enormous boulders all that distance? 

Anita: This sounds more like an essay than a poem to me. Poetry is like lightning.

Ted: I know. I look at things like a historian.

Anita: Poetry is like the blind men feeling parts of the elephant—if one of them suddenly were able to see, when he opened his eyes he would probably say, “Oh! An elephant!” That would be the prose version.

Ted: But I do keep on wondering how they could even try to move all those enormous stones.

Anita: In my poem, I’m trying to figure out why these stones looked so small to me, like a bunch of old crones hunched over a pot on the heath. How did they get so small?

Ted: To me, they looked huge, as if they were reaching for the sky.

Anita: Yeah, that makes perfect sense, too. But probably harder to write about, since they’re supposed to look huge: it’s part of their reputation. You can’t just say, “Gosh, they’re so big!”

Ted: Hmm, there must be another reason. I mean, a reason why I was surprised at how big they were. What “big” was I expecting that was different from what I saw instead? Hmmm . . .

At that point, I tiptoed quietly away. I don’t want to encourage him too much. One poet in the house is enough!

Note: The second image illustrating this column derives from http://www.heritagedaily.com/tag/stonehenge.

Order Anita Sullivan’s books through http://www.seventhdragon.com/.