The Splendor of the Ordinary

I have a confession to make: I’m not a fan of poetry.  For someone who loves literature, I see this not as a mere preference (as for pancakes over scrambled eggs), but an actual defect.  It may be due to mental laziness (poetry can be so difficult) or a childish appetite for narrative (Tell me a story!), or the usual busy-ness of life (it takes time)–but metered lines on a page make me want to turn the page.

However.  Early this year, on the enthusiastic advice of Eric Metaxes (no, I don’t know him; he contributed to an end-of-the-year recommended reading list), I bought a used copy of Chance or the Dance? by Thomas Howard.  Never heard of Thomas Howard; still don’t know anything about him, and the book was originally published 43 years ago.  The subtitle is A Critique of Modern Secularism, and the theme is recapturing the sense of significance that ordinary life used to possess when people believed.  People believe now, of course, but our separation of church and state has made faith a private matter, not to be flaunted in the public square.  In his book, Thomas Howard goes about prying up the paving stones we walk on every day and discovering the ritual, even ceremonial aspects of commonplaces like setting the table for lunch.  It was his chapter on poetry, titled “One Foot Up, One Foot Down,” that made me want to acknowledge National Poetry Month.

Poetry, as most readers would agree, is the highest expression of literature, but it may also be one of the highest expressions of human experience.  The thing that makes it most forbidding–formality—is the thing that most defines it.  Form is the one requirement for poetry–even free verse obeys some interior structural law, and its value for the reader is exactly that.  Form expresses the ceremonial aspect of life that keeps cropping up in our rituals: how we greet the day, how we set the table, how we meet strangers, how we behave at a party.  Our inclination toward form is not just a matter of etiquette; it tells us that we are not accidental or random. We strive for meaning.  We live in expectation.  We delight in rhythm.  Notice how easily Mother-Goose rhymes come to lodge in little minds: “Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye . . .”  As Howard asks, “Why sing a song of anything?  Why not read an editorial from the Times?”

Editorials from the Times are urgent, compelling (at least they try to be), and quickly dated.  Poetry is subtle, persuasive, and timeless.  When life comes to look like a treadmill, day following day with its mechanical regularity, poetry traps everyday experience and makes us look.  “It is imagination that plants in us in the first place the idea that the turning [i.e., the routine] may be robbing us of our only chance to live, unless we find out that at the center of every turning there is a still point, and we move toward that point in whose stillness there are held all the turnings that seem so helter-skelter to us.”   Poetry “addresses our imagination and, with everything that is at its service, it tries to beguile us into the intense awareness of experience . . .  and to return us to life with the awareness that it is packed with glory . . .”

It’s no accident, in other words, that human beings write and read poetry.  And developing an appreciation for it is one way to develop an appreciation for life and for humanity itself.  A picture book published a couple of months ago gives us a vivid example of what Howard is talking about:

Step Gently Out, by Helen Frost, photography by Rick Lieder.  Candlewick, 2012, 25 pages.  Age/interest level: 6-up.

Most children—maybe all of them—are fascinated by bugs.  At least, “bug” is the generic name we slap on these intricate, multi-legged creatures that are sometimes scary, sometimes a nuisance, often underfoot or overhead.  We seldom take time to really look at them.  Helen Frost’s poem is about really looking:

Step gently out;

be still, and watch a single blade of grass.

An ant climbs up to look around,

a honeybee flies past.

The photography captures various creatures in extreme close-up as they go about their very ordinary lives.  Talk about routine!  Insects are the personification of routine, with their mechanical joints and clicking mandibles, but these photos search out the moth-ness of a Chickweed Geometer moth, the spiderality of an orb-weaving spider, as the words of the poem cast a net of significance about them:

Balanced lightly on a leaf,

bathed in golden light;

flashing, Look! I’m over here,

as evening turns to night.

An appendix lists all the creatures and tells some fascinating facts about them.  Fascinating facts are great; younger kids especially love learning this stuff.  But the poem gives them something else: an awareness of the moment (“Look! I’m over here”), the brightness and promise of morning, the hush and calm of twilight, that belongs to all of God’s creatures.  “In song and dance and stillness/ they share the world with you.”

Poetry shares the world with all of us.

FOLLOW UP: See my Interview with David Harrison, an old hand at this stuff, for practical tips and suggestions for encouraging children to explore poetry for themselves.