the fear of poetry

The knowing self is full of darkness, distortion, and error; it does not want to be exposed and challenged to change. It seeks objectified knowledge in order to know without being known.
[Parker J. Palmer, To Know as We Are Known 121 (New York: Harper & Row, 1983)]

A man can try to act out a story that, for him, is false, inappropriate, destructive. Commonly, in fact, people try to be what they cannot be, pretend to be other than they are, overlook their own best strengths in imitation of someone else’s story.
[Michael Novak, Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove: An Invitation to Religious Studies 60 (New York: Harper & Row, rev. ed., 1978)]

Two quotes found quite by chance have led me, as usual, in an unexpected direction. Well, maybe the direction is not that unexpected: my thoughts turn to it whenever I hear the usual suspects excusing themselves for not reading - or listening to - poetry. And, of course, this more or less subtle poetry-bashing implies that the freaks who do read it and make it a part of their lives are constantly forced to justify themselves for the eccentricity.

No one has written more eloquently about the phenomenon than Muriel Rukeyser, an unjustly forgotten American poet whose Life of Poetry should be read, not so much by all poetry lovers, as by all poetry haters. Realising though how unfair it is to single out individual passages in this passionate apologia for poetry, I dare select the following:

Now poetry, at this moment, stands in curious relationship to our acceptance of life and our way of living.

[...]

Anyone dealing with poetry and the love of poetry must deal, then, with the hatred of poetry, and perhaps even ignore with the indifference which is driven toward the center. It comes through as boredom, as name-calling, as the traditional attitude of the last hundred years which has chalked in the portrait of the poet as he is known to this society, which, as Herbert Read says, "does not challenge poetry in principle it merely treats it with ignorance, indifference and unconscious cruelty."

Poetry is foreign to us, we do not let it enter our daily lives.

Do you remember the poems of your early childhood the far rhymes and games of the begining to which you called the rhythms, the little songs to which you woke and went to sleep?

Yes, we remember them.

But since childhood, to many of us poetry has become a matter of distaste. The speaking of poetry is one thing: one of the qualifications listed for an announcer on a great network, among "good voice" and "correct pronunciation," is the "ability to read and interpret poetry." The other side is told conclusively in a letter sent ninety years ago by the wife of the author of Moby Dick. Mrs. Melville said to her mother "Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around."

What is the nature of this distaste?

If you ask your friends about it, you will find that there are a few answers, repeated by everyone. One is that the friend has not the time for poetry. This is a curious choice, since poetry, of all the arts that live in time music, theater, film, writing is the briefest, the most compact. Or your friends may speak of their boredom with poetry. If you hear this, ask further. You will find that "boredom" is a masking answer, concealing different meanings. One person will confess that he has been frightened off forever by the dry dissection of lines in school, and that now he thinks with disappointment of a poem as simply a set of constructions. He expects much more. One will say that he returned from the scenes of war to a high-school classroom reading "Bobolink, bobolink / Spink, spank, spink." A first-rate scientist will search for the formal framework of the older poetry in despair, and finally stop. One will confess that, try as he will, he cannot understand poetry, and more particularly, modern writing. It is intellectual, confused, unmusical. One will say it is willfully obscure. One that it is inapplicable to the situation in which he finds himself. And almost any man will say that it is effeminate: it is true that poetry as an art is sexually suspect.

In all of these answers, we meet a slipping-away which is the clue to the responses, and which is strong enough to be called more than direct resistance.

This resistance has the quality of fear, it expresses the fear of poetry.

I have found in working with people and with poem, that this fear presents the symptoms of a psychic problem. A poem does invite, it does require. What does it invite? A poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond. And better than that: a poem invites a total response.

This response is total, but it is reached through the emotions. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

from Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry.

And emotion, feeling, however grim and unsettling (but not necessarily so, quite the contrary!), is the truth, the refusal of falsehood, blindness, numbness, forgetfulness. That is to say, the other side of the depressing banality through which most people sleepwalk in life most of the time.