Two poems to understand poetry.

If you want to know: why is poetry is so boring !? (or powerful), ask Google.

For the first edition of Poetries, I thought we should start at the beginning.
What is poetry? why is poetry so powerful (or boring?)
To me, simply put, poetry is freedom, expressed — it has to come from a place where there is some degree of disinhibition.

I’d like to share a delicious poem by Frank O’Hara that conveys this feelings and much more.

My Heart

I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.
I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says “That’s
not like Frank!”, all to the good! I
don’t wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart —
you can’t plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

​In this poem the narrator experiences a range of emotions, wears different clothes, smokes different weeds, goes to the opera and the movies — he doesn’t want, it seems, to be concerned with coherence, to pose as “Frank”, taking selfies for an audience, and that is something he is quite adamant about.
In the last few verses he states clearly that he wants his experiences to be immediate and his appearance too: simple, and genuine.

​He can make himself live by his set of values, yet there is one part of his self which he cannot control: his heart. Lucky for him, though, most of his is made of poetry, which is “open”.

​In a way, it’s exactly because his heart is made of poetry that he lives his life with such openness,
and that’s, I think , what poetry does for us.

_________

Start by building the roof, of course.

I’ll share a second and last poem today, by Billy Collings. Its title says it all: it’s a sort of Poetry Reader 101,a crash course in sixteen short verses.

_________

Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with a rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means

_________

I hope that, short of explaining what poetry is, this first newsletter has given you a taste of what poetry can be for you, and Billy Collins has given you some tips on what kind of reader you can be to it.

See you soon!

Caro

PS: While I was mulling over the contents of this first article, I came across a fun little website with a list of “poems about poetry”. You might enjoy it too: here.

This article is the first installment of Poetries with Caro, a newsletter for the poetry curious and inclined. Signup here if you’d like to receive it in your inbox.

​If you’d like to submit a poem (yours or otherwise), artwork, or collaborate in some other way,email poetrieswithcaro@gmail.com