TRANSCRIPT

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

Poetry can be daunting to read. I understand. Over the years, I have heard many people state that it’s just not their thing. That they prefer to attend a ball game, watch a favorite TV series or hear live music. Poetry’s inscrutability can be off-putting, maybe even pretentious. I, too dislike it, said a famous poet. 

For those who are new to poetry or wish to overcome their reticence, here are a few tips: 

1. Treat poetry like a rollercoaster. You may not know the laws of physics, but it does not prevent you from enjoying the ride. Poetry values ambiguity and it is okay not to know all of its layers. There are poems that I cherish and could not tell you with great assuredness their meanings. I only know the feeling I experience saying the words out loud, the exuberance of hearing a phrase that I had never heard before. 

   Another famous poet said, “A poem should not mean, but be.” That is, poetry is written to be experienced as language rather than examined like bacteria. Where uncertainty exists, accept it as such and relish what sounds, imagery, and insights that are gleaned, for you. The poem will be around a long time. You can return to it. Not giving into the frustration of not knowing is a Buddhist value and life-long skill.

2. Poetry encourages voyages, often within us. Sometimes where we go in hearts and minds is illuminating.

   Poems meander, slow us down, take their sweet time; they unfold sentences that are lush and giving. Poems cultivate attention. It’s fun to track a poem; alone or with friends, unpacking its references and discussing where we are taken inside ourselves. 

   A childhood friend, Dena, wrote me to say that she and some girlfriends shared a poem featured on the Slowdown between them. It was a week of back and forth over text. As a shared experience, a poem can be binding when we help each other hear its wisdoms.

3. Finally, it helps to know that often the subject of poetry is poetry. As in today’s poem, which uses the image of the argonaut, an octopus and its shell-like egg sac, as a metaphor for the creative act itself. 

The Paper Nautilus
by Marianne Moore

      For authorities whose hopes 
are shaped by mercenaries?
      Writers entrapped by 
      teatime fame and by
commuters’ comforts? Not for these
      the paper nautilus 
      constructs her thin glass shell.

      Giving her perishable 
souvenir of hope, a dull
      white outside and smooth-
      edged inner surface
glossy as the sea, the watchful
      maker of it guards it
      day and night; she scarcely

      eats until the eggs are hatched.
Buried eight-fold in her eight
      arms, for she is in 
      a sense a devil-
fish, her glass ramshorn-cradled freight
      is hid but is not crushed. 
      As Hercules, bitten

      by a crab loyal to the hydra,
was hindered to succeed,
      the intensively
      watched eggs coming from 
the shell free it when they are freed,—
      leaving its wasp-nest flaws
      of white on white, and close-

      laid Ionic chiton-folds
like the lines in the mane of
      A Parthenon horse,
      round which the arms had
would themselves as if they knew love
      is the only fortress
      strong enough to trust to.

This poem is in the public domain.