This is Good Poetry
Eating Bread and Honey by Pattiann Rogers and musings from yours truly <3
In the midst of a tragic but thankfully short-lived bout of not vibing with books in general last month, I did what any girl would do: I read some poetry instead. I know that technically what I read is a book of poetry, but you get what I mean. I perused the shelf (my shelf) and located a slimish volume purchased at Housing Works many moons ago, and still yet to be read.
I like to buy poetry at Housing Works because the selection is always small and, by nature of the thing, completely dictated by the tastes of my neighbors. They definitely don’t always have good taste, and whichever one of them drops off her Book of the Month Club book every month unread really needs to cancel her subscription, but sometimes they seem to know just what I need. Which is usually a Milkweed Editions. in this case, Pattiann Rogers’s Eating Bread and Honey.
Admittedly, this is not the most seasonally apt collection of poetry. It is spring and summer bound to the page: almost frantic with potential energy and teeming with life. Like in middle school science class when you put a drop of pond water on one of those little glass slides and look at it through a microscope and all of a sudden you’re in this vibrating world of little spiky fuzzy creatures. Livers—like things that live, not the organ. Then just as quickly, Rogers flips you around and you’re considering entire buzzing galaxies from the small end of a telescope. You become the fuzzy liver in the vibrating drop of water.
But then again, maybe a collection of poetry like this is actually just right as we enter the darkest days of the year. It's all a circle after all, all still to come. There’s a sensuality that weaves its way throughout the collection that we’d be good to hold onto in the coming months. I didn’t read with a pencil because I’m a fool! But even just flipping back through my eyes lit on lines and images that struck me the first time and struck me again. I’ve underlined them now, so that I can go back in the months ahead.
My microscope telescope adventure captures something more about Rogers’s poetry than just her powerful zooming in zooming out effect. Not to pat myself on the back for the complexity and layered-ness of my own metaphors, but they (I) serve to highlight the scientific element of her work. It’s microbiology, zoology, ecology, astronomy, physiology, mythology, theology and a study of the human soul.
In one poem, we find ourselves “Deep within the spore-sphere / of a protozoa rising slowly / through cold lulls and currents…” bumping along through the world, rising falling and drifting. Deep inside every single celled organism asks, “in a repetition of the very / first cry and reverie known on earth, / for summer.”
In another, we are face to face, lip to lip, with the kit fox. Another still, shows us the “the brambled / skeleton of the jay, anthracite spine, / thorny blades and femurs, tangle / of knuckled twigs flittering.” The longest poem in the collection is titled “Animals and People: ‘The Human Heart in Conflict with Itself.’”
We are told that the silence sings “on the white-statue plains / of the moon’s weird winter” and reminded of the awesome “wrecked suns of obliterating / stellar furies and smelting quasars / ejecting the seething matter of stars.” And then we are draped in stars ourselves—our human bodies are. The stars “are the luminescence of blood / and circuit the body,” and we are bound to them, inseparable. We are eating bread and honey to store the light inside of us through the dark cold winter (!!!).
Rogers creates worlds within the smallest of creatures, the smallest of moments, and she echoes them out to the furthest reaches of our universes and wildest imaginings. It staggers!
But don’t let my rambling mislead you. She does not ramble, and despite all my talk of her flipping you around and zooming in and out, that’s just my view from the other side of the journey. When you're actually reading, she's quite careful with you. Her poems are meticulously constructed. I hesitate to say easy reading, because they contain such depth and offer so much to think about, but they’re not difficult to read, or brain bending in the way that some poetry can be.
So we’ve come to the thing I really loved about this collection, which is the fact that it is attainable, accessible, intelligible, etc.—even those of you who may not read a lot of poetry. Even those of you who don’t read poetry at all!
I’m about to go on a little tirade, which requires me to first state the following: poetry, and particularly good poetry should be read. This is a fundamental belief of mine. If you don’t read it, you should! If you read bad poetry, you should read good poetry instead. If you read good poetry, you should read more of it.
What is good poetry? Good question, and a hard one to answer. Without coming across too aggressive (this was so aggressive the first time I wrote it), a lot of the most popular poetry out there today, at least commercially and in the mainstream, is total trash. Drivel. Banal nothingness. Obvious and unexciting sentiments chopped up haphazardly into short lines. I don’t think bad poetry is a new phenomenon, but the proliferation of the Instagram poet is, and the Instagram poet is, I’m sorry to say, bad.1
Now I know the counterarguments, and I can go through them. If people like it (the bad poetry), why can’t you just let them enjoy it? Fair. But if I knew you were subsisting on a diet of mown grass, I would try to encourage you to try an arugula salad. These poets just write what sells. Yes, but hungry people will eat mown grass if they don’t know that arugula exists. Plus, it’s the responsibility of the grass farmers to label their seeds as grass instead of arugula so that people stop eating the grass. Maybe what you define as good poetry (you pretentious asshole) is too complex for the average modern mind. Maybe this is the poetry of the future. Nope! Refuse to believe it’s true. The human metabolism hasn’t evolved such in the past ~100 years that now grass is all we can digest. Any evolution in that direction MUST be PROMPTLY reversed through eating more arugula. Or, for that matter, any other leafy green of your choosing.
The collective human mind has not devolved to such an extent that it is no longer capable of processing good poetry. I have more faith than that. People just need to be reminded. Need to be convinced that reading poetry is a worthwhile and achievable endeavor, which is what I am here to do.
Eve…maybe that’s what the Instagram poets are here to do too, did you ever think of that? Yes, I thought of that. It’s the only argument I can think of that sways me even a little bit. If someone warms to the idea of reading (good) poetry after seeing some (nonsense) poetry on social media, then GOOD. However, I find it hard to believe that this is the goal of the Instagram poet, since it would mean that they’d eventually lose all their readers. You see, having tasted of the high, soaring, transporting…salad…that is available to them, out there waiting, they’d refuse to take the grass.
In classic fashion I’ve stayed up on my soapbox too long and my metaphor holds on for dear life, but hopefully you get my meaning. Pattiann Rogers is here for the taking (eating? I don’t know). I believe that the enjoyment of her good words is well within our collective reach. To prove it, feast on this.
Opus from Space
Almost everything I know is glad
to be born—not only the desert orangetip,
on the twist flower or tansy, shaking
birth moisture from its wings, but also the naked
warbler nesting, head wavering toward sky,
and the honey possum, the pygmy possum,
blind, hairless thimbles of forward,
press and part.
Almost everything I’ve seen pushes
toward the place of that state as if there were
no knowing any other—the violent crack
and seed-propelling shot of the witch hazel pod,
the philosophy implicit in the inside out
seed-thrust of the wood sorrel. All hairy
saltcedar seeds are single-minded
in their grasping of wind and spinning
for luck toward birth by water.
And I’m fairly shocked to consider
all the bludgeonings and batterings going on
continually, the head-rammings, wing-furors,
and beak-crackings, fighting for release
inside gelatinous shells, leather shells,
calcium shells or rough, horny shells. Legs
and shoulder, knees and elbows flail likewise
against their womb walls everywhere, in pine
forest niches, seepage banks and boggy
prairies, among savannah grasses, on woven
mats and perfumed linen sheets.
Mad zealots, every one, even before
beginning they are dark dust-congealings
of pure frenzy to come into light.
Almost everything I know rages to be born,
the obsession founding itself explicitly
in the coming bone harps and ladders,
the heart-thrusts, vessels and voices
of all those speeding with clear and total
fury toward this singular honor.
okay, love you, bye <3
You can actually find good poetry on Instagram (I like poetryisnotaluxury myself). If you don’t know what I mean when I say “Instagram poets,” look up Rupi Kaur or Atticus. Sorry!
well SAID!!!!!!!!!