This post is meant to show you why poems matter and how the way we read them changes their value. I know this might be outside your comfort zone, but if you’re a skeptic, I ask you to bear with me.
Ten years and some spare change ago, I lived in Wichita and felt I was there by accident and didn’t belong (think: seas of baseball caps and sweatpants, indie films are thought pretentious).
I didn’t understand myself and didn’t know what I wanted. I had just given up on a music degree because I felt that music had done all it could for me. There were parts of myself I needed a new language to find, and that language was poetry.
I had felt before like an undercover agent for poems. I remember being bored out of my skull in math class, pressing my pen through my paper in anger because learning about numbers made no sense. Before placing my graphing calculator in the bin, I wrote “E.E. Cummings is king.” (I think I agreed with him that “feeling is first.”)
All of this is now embarrassing in the right context, as I now understand the reason students hate mathematics is because it’s taught through memorization rather than with the critical thinking and creativity that makes it beautiful. And I’ve moved from E.E. Cummings to other poets, but the passion is still there.
But we can put all that aside.
I’m here to convince you that poems are cool. More than that, much like each culture is limited by its language’s vocabulary, we are limited as humans if we do not speak the language of poetry.
I sense your hesitation. I get it. You may have felt about poetry the way I felt about algebra — why don’t poets just say what they mean plainly? Is there worth to verse? (Please groan here.)
Source: Lithub, “Poems R Just Less Popular Memes”
The way we’re taught poetry in school is often technical. We’re asked to memorize the definition of “anaphora” and decode poems so we can give a one-sentence summary. We start with the least accessible poems like Shakespeare’s sonnets simply because they’re classic and for some reason, school is about the classics. None of this leads to enjoyment — how it feels to live inside a poem, how poems can make leaps in space and time no other form can make.
However, all of this argument is useless unless I can prove myself to you. I’m going to show you one of the first poems that knocked me on my ass and showed me what poems can do that no other writing can. It helped me access parts of myself I didn’t know existed. And I’m going to help you learn to speak the poem’s language just like someone else helped me.
Don’t worry — it’s only 53 words (shorter than the last paragraph), and I’m not going to use terms like “iambic pentameter.” But you need to trust me, or you might get frustrated.
Here’s what I want you to do. And if you don’t do this, the rest of what I have to say means less. I want you to:
Read this slowly. I’m betting so far, if your eyes were cars, they’ve been going at about 50 mph so far. Slow that down to about 12 mph, like you’re going through a neighborhood and want to read the addresses on the houses you pass. You’ll notice more this way.
If you’re in a place where you can read it out loud, read it out loud. Poetry is musical, so it’s best if you can hear it.
Accept that you may be confused for a minute. Poetry isn’t something you only decode. It’s something you enjoy for its music, tone, mystery. This could be a new language for you. It’s OK if it takes some time to get fluent. And even then, part of the draw of poetry is mystery and open-endedness.
Ready? The poem is right below, waiting for you.
Ghosts at Her Grandmother’s House
Gregory Orr
It is autumn and I can see the lake because leaves have fallen. The distant water becomes blue leaves on the bare branches of oaks.
I look back at the house: two empty armchairs on the porch. She is sitting in one of them, and my wife is a child in her arms.
Give yourself a minute. Let it sink in.
Now, read it again. Out loud this time, if you didn’t earlier. Here it is below:
Ghosts at Her Grandmother’s House
Gregory Orr
It is autumn and I can see the lake because leaves have fallen. The distant water becomes blue leaves on the bare branches of oaks.
I look back at the house: two empty armchairs on the porch. She is sitting in one of them, and my wife is a child in her arms.
Then, sit still for one full minute and don’t do ANYTHING (including counting seconds) but look at the poem, maybe seeing which parts stand out and you want to go back to. Don’t try to decode it. This is time to absorb the poem and quiet your mind. Don’t read on until you’ve done this. I mean it. And remember, if you’re confused, let yourself be confused.
Did you do it? I hope so.
Here’s your next task. (I’m not going to do ALL the work for you. I want you to know you have the power to speak poetry on your own.) I want you to find every word in the poem that feels like or seems similar to the word “loss.” Scroll up and do that now.
When you’re ready, here’s my list:
autumn
fallen
distant
bare
empty
As I finished writing the above list just now, I started to feel this poem. My mood just shifted from that of a red-blooded poetry-crusader determined for you to love poetry how I love it to the feeling of losing someone and that loss surrounding you like a frozen blanket years later. To feel left behind and alone. There is death in this poem, starting from the title and ending with the ghosts at the end. And it’s in between, with the bare branches and distant lake. There’s a sense of separation from the living world and the people this speaker knew well — his wife and her grandmother.
Grief is in our DNA. Loss is part and parcel of the bargain that brought you your life. And both sides of this bargain are alive in this poem.
Loss is in the landscape each year as leaves die and fall from the trees so they can survive the winter. It’s in the house’s empty armchairs. The focus that’s placed on these chairs makes me think the speaker knows this house well and has been accustomed to seeing the chairs filled by people who are no longer here — their emptiness signifies an important loss. Note that to feel this loss, we required no backstory, no character building, no explanation of how the deaths happened or how long ago, no name of the place where there is a cabin and trees and a lake. In poems, you can do more within less space.
Source: Casey Fyfe, Unsplash
OK, let’s look at words. Because poems were first only spoken aloud, they have a musical quality of repeating sounds, and those sounds are often important to other parts of the poem. Your next task is to scan the poem for every word that starts with a “b.” Here’s the poem again.
Ghosts at Her Grandmother’s House
Gregory Orr
It is autumn and I can see the lake because leaves have fallen. The distant water becomes blue leaves on the bare branches of oaks.
I look back at the house: two empty armchairs on the porch. She is sitting in one of them, and my wife is a child in her arms.
Here’s my list:
because
becomes
blue
bare
branches
To me, the letter “b” gives a tender, gentle sound. It’s one of the first sounds babies make: “buh.” Much sweeter than choppy consonants like “d” or “k.” There are also quite a few L’s in the poem...leaves, lake, the “l” of fallen and blue. These sounds help us hear the poem’s tone like a bass helps set not just tempo but also tone in a song.
The sounds tell me this loss isn’t harsh. It isn’t (at this time at least) like walking barefoot on frozen grass, like coming home to find someone has taken all your furniture, like the speaker is yelling into a wall of snow.
No, there’s a tenderness to this loss...it’s still grief, still mourning, but there’s also movement to what comes after grief. The speaker is between two places: the lake and the house.
Speaking of which, I admire how authoritatively our scene is set. It is autumn, I can see the lake, leaves have fallen, and (my favorite) the distant water becomes blue leaves. There is no hesitation, concession, or question. This speaker is clear-headed.
Now for what it means. In the world of poems, water can become leaves and we need not explain in what sense or why — the point is the experience rather than the explanation. Think about why the lake becomes leaves, and consider the rest of the poem. Take some time to create your own interpretation. Everything is correct as long as it can be traced through what’s on the page.
Here’s my interpretation.
Water gives us life. It’s why all civilizations are built near rivers. Water keeps us alive and creates new life. It’s also death, like the Ganges River of India where so many family member’s ashes are poured each year, like the River Styx that goes through the underworld, like how ocean storms claim lives in shipwrecks, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods. Water is continuous and connective, like how the Mississippi flows through the entire country, a life creator, and a life ender — it’s the full life-cycle.
So when the speaker can see water, that matters. And it’s because the leaves no longer obscure his view the speaker can see the lake. It’s because death shakes us up to show us what matters that he can see what’s often obscured and invisible and also essential.
And the water looks like leaves even when the tree has none. He knows the leaves will come back, that this mourning isn’t the end. This is his future — there will be more life.
But he’s compelled to look back to the house — this loss won’t leave him. And he sees the empty chairs are filled with ghosts — her grandmother and his wife, who is now a child. He sees her as innocent and new, and most importantly, he sees her. She’s still here, and she isn’t alone.
The past doesn’t leave this person. But he has enough distance from this loss to also see the lake and know that life continues. He sees the possibilities of new life in nature echoed in the new life of a child. The new life can’t come without death.
In 53 words, this poem has created music, a small world, and one of the most universal experiences — reckoning with death. What it means and how we can live with it. It did this with no backstory.
It doesn’t need a backstory. But the backstory is powerful and adds a layer of meaning, so I’ll tell you anyway.
The poet, Gregory Orr, accidentally shot his brother while they were hunting, and his brother died. Gregory Orr was 12 years old. His mother died shortly thereafter, and his father became addicted to amphetamines. This man is fluent in grief but like all of us, he isn’t immune to its pain.
Orr leaned on poems to carry him through the grief, the guilt. He sheltered in, lived in “The City of Poetry” (the name of a section of his book “River Inside the River”). He was once imprisoned but able to keep a book of Keats. He said in “River Inside the River,”
The poem was my ladder:
Rungs and lifts of escape.
Source: Poetry Foundation
Poetry gives shelter. Poems help us make sense of ourselves. I’ve often written poems without knowing what they were “about” until months later when I understood a new part of myself — fears of intimacy, overwhelming, exhausting empathy toward everyone I met, feelings of abandonment. Until I could understand these parts of myself through psychological language, I spoke them through poems and felt better for it. These parts of ourselves we don’t understand still need to be heard because they’re part of our entire, crazy, complex, contradictory natures.
To not try to speak poetry is to ignore your subconscious, ignore what can’t be explained any other way.
To speak poetry is to do the opposite. It’s to listen with feeling and awareness to even the least comfortable parts of yourself. You might argue with me, but I think poetry can save lives. And it breaks my heart that most of us don’t speak it.
Most of us get frustrated and get out before it gets good. It takes time and patience, and we tend to want things to happen quickly. But everyone can read and write poetry, and everyone can benefit from this just as everyone benefits from being literate.
“Ghosts at Her Grandmother’s House” is 53 words, and it knocks me on my ass every time I read it. The first time was at Wichita State, and I was 18 and knew next to nothing, and the poet Albert Goldbarth showed us its magic the first day of my first poetry class. I felt like there had always been this locked door in the house that was my life and he had just unlocked it for me and the world through that door was a strange, overwhelming beauty.
The sky was clear and sunny with Midwestern gusts sweeping across the brown grass where the red tulips grown each year hadn’t bloomed yet. I gripped a red spiral notebook that held my notes that were suddenly the key to everything.