by Will LaPage
We are all poets, and every poem is an interpretation.
The poet is no more mysterious than is the scientist. One is in love with words, the other with numbers. For either, it’s the beauty of the formulation that counts, not its acceptance. For Einstein, E=mc2 was pure poetry. That it could change the world was in distant second place to the breakthrough in understanding it encapsulated. For Robert Frost, the imagery of two roads diverging in a wood was an equally elegant formula for describing life. The thought that schoolchildren might be repeating the lines somewhere ages and ages hence probably never crossed his mind.
We are fond of saying that poetry has the power to awaken the senses, but these two examples suggest that we ought to credit the poet, at least, with somewhat more modest objectives. The acceptance of a poem is profoundly anticlimactic; as W. H. Auden so poetically observed: “The publication of a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal in the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” The formulation is everything; if the poem resonates with others, that’s a bonus.
It seems highly unlikely that Emerson was the first to challenge us to seek out our inner poet, but he probably said it best by insisting that our poetry will come out in other ways if we choose not to write it. In fact, the ability to live our poetry seems vastly superior to just committing it to paper. While we may deny our inner poet, we cannot deny our feelings, our senses, and our emotions—the very intangibles that make us distinctly human and distinctively individual. Those things are the essence of life as well as the building blocks of poetry.
If we are all poets, living our poetry, then it follows that poetry is all around us. If you haven’t noticed any today, try putting on the glasses of your inner poet so that you might enjoy the poetry in a falling leaf, a random act of kindness, a passing cloud, or a tax refund. Just in the past few hours, I witnessed three acts of living poetry that are not easily converted to the written word. On the morning news, I heard a report of a dog rescuing a litter of kittens from a burning building. This was followed by an item about a mortgage buyer, at auction, giving the home back to its tearful owner. Later, while kayaking on the White River, I watched a grandfather teaching a child to fly fish and then how to gently release his catch. Such living poetry almost defies written interpretation, and yet, each contains the paradoxical seed of a great poem.
Just as a painting or a photograph is not the real thing, a poem is always an inadequate interpretation of living poetry. As with the painting, the written poem contains no small amount of artistic license. The poet has no obligation to accurately portray the scene, only an artistic obligation to be interesting. Like any good interpretation, poetry is an attempt to artfully portray a story, provoking interest, while seeking to be relevant, focused, and informative. I particularly like Max Bodenheim’s definition because it neatly addresses all of these criteria: “Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the wind.” In these nine words, Bodenheim demonstrates two additional principles: those of economy of words and organization of thought—the right word in exactly the right place!
With the possible exception of prehistoric rock etching, poetry may well be humans’ first attempt at interpreting their world. For centuries, in the absence of a written language and readily available writing materials, the poet/bard, sometimes using musical accompaniment, provided our primary interpretations of life and history, using sagas that were provocative, interesting, relevant, focused, and artful. The principles of interpretation, not articulated until the mid-1950s by Freeman Tilden, were firmly in place in the ancients’ job description for their poets. The Roman poet, Horace, writing in 65 BC, called poets “the first teachers of mankind.” Now, more than 2,000 years later, poetry remains unconstrained and undiminished by today’s still limited tools of communication technology. In the current resurgence of interest in poetry, we may actually be seeing a backlash to the growing impersonality of modern communication.
Poetry is intensely personal because it is fundamentally emotional, calling on our senses and getting us to think in different ways about the accepted and the commonplace. It is no coincidence that totalitarian regimes are known for locking up their poets or, at the very least, keeping them under surveillance and labeling these basically peace-loving artists-with-words as dangerous to the state. For the oppressor, words are dangerous because they promote thinking, and while words cannot be purged, wordsmiths can. Most of us would agree with Rudyard Kipling that “words are the most powerful drug ever used by mankind.” And then along comes Pablo Neruda, who nicely puts that power in perspective by pointing out that “peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.”
“I am not a teacher, but an awakener” says Frost. The poet is not content with limiting sensorial exploration to the traditional five of taste, touch, sight, sound, and smell. Our senses of peace, place, and purpose are fertile fields for poetry to explore, as are intuition and the sense of wonder, because they allow us to look inside ourselves and discover not just our inner poet, but our inner nature, our beliefs. To allow ourselves an open mind to examine the paradoxical in our beliefs may be the ultimate sense of freedom—freedom to discover one’s self.
Some of our less physical senses are no easier to turn off than are the senses of taste or touch. Along with senses of beauty and danger, our sense of direction (our inner compass), the sense of time (our inner clock), and the senses of balance, motion, and distance all work to keep us out of trouble as we literally and metaphorically create and walk the tightropes of our lives. Spidermen, indeed!
The collection of senses connecting the inner self with the world around us, often curiously labeled common sense, provides endless fields for poetic exploration. Without, at least, a sense of humor we’d be hard pressed to deal with the often bizarre situations that the world throws at us. A sense of appropriateness is invaluable in countless settings where the dictates of order, civility, behavior, proportion, and protocol define social acceptability. In fact, our sense of appropriateness has been one of our richest sources of both humor and poetry.
Over time, we develop complex senses of justice and honor as we maneuver among the land mines of fairness, respect, loyalty, pride, ethics, and responsibility. Our sense of worth guides us in making judgments about needs and wants, and cost versus value. And our sense of compassion naturally reaches out to embrace love, caring, sympathy, empathy, and sadness. Just imagine how many times the injustice of unrequited love has diminished someone’s sense of worth over the millennia.
In poetry we find a safe haven for dealing with the paradoxical nature of life. Our human inconsistencies are wildly evident throughout our common senses. For example, the senses of pleasure and guilt seem to have neatly teamed up to fuel two of the world’s largest economies: entertainment and religion. And, our sense of the spiritual or supernatural allows us to cope, at least in superficial ways, with the phenomena that science has yet to explain—the sacred, the metaphysical, the mystical, and the magical. If God could create the perfection of something like a tree, why bother with fools like me (with apologies to Joyce Kilmer)?
Our many senses exist at remarkably different levels of development and respond to an infinite variety of settings, making us truly sensate and, hopefully, sensible beings. It is not just our sense of beauty, but every one of our senses that exists in the eye of the beholder. But “poetry is something more than just good sense,” said Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That something more is how we feel about what we sense, feelings that range from indifferent to passionate. The poet creates “weapons of mass instruction” by combining two common household ingredients: words and passion.
If poetry does have the ability to awaken our myriad senses, it surely does so by recognizing the paradoxical in life and laying it bare with passion and clarity. And, if poetry is to fully use its ability to interpret life, it must be available, it must be demystified. It must be appreciated and valued for its emotional logic, just as we value science for its analytic logic.
Emotional logic—the realization that humans can be simultaneously subjective and objective, that there are truths that are satisfying to both sides of the brain—may well be what poetry does best. The appeal of poetry is the appeal of words, and the appeal of words is the appeal of the imagination. It is tempting to substitute the word power for the word appeal, however, power is not the right word simply because poetry is to power as waves are to the shore. Power, for the poet, would only be a burden. Poetry does not play in the power arena; it is the voice you hear after the arena grows silent, when the players have left, when the light of dawn reminds us that the arena is not the real world we live in.
“When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” —John F. Kennedy
Will La Page is the author of Voices from the Park, and A Park is A Poem on the Land, available from PublishAmerica.com, and Parks for Life, from Venturepublish.com.
The other day, I visited a popular coffee shop around the corner from my home in Marquette, Michigan. I ordered a hot beverage and sat down to enjoy a National Park Service multimedia program (i.e., podcast) called Yosemite Nature Notes.
This issue marks the completion of a transition that Legacy started at the beginning of the year. Some differences you will see immediately (the typeface used on the magazine’s flag and headlines is different) while others you will discover over time as you read the magazine. However, the magazine continues to contain feature articles that relate to a specific theme (this time, it’s interpretation’s role in for-profit tourism) as well as articles of benefit to the professional interpreter that do not necessarily relate to that theme.
Lessons of an Old Man
by Ron Russo
Having retired many years earlier, he said that he had always wanted to come to America and so he and his wife did and ultimately made their way to the West Coast. Now, in the twilight of his life he relived the thousands of hours he had spent fixing, replacing, creating anew all of the pieces and parts that made those 19th- and early 20th-century ships work and sail the vast Mediterranean—all of this in his small backyard workshop in San Leandro, California. He used a few simple tools—a file, a whittling knife, a small drill, a block plane. He used old orange and apple crates for most of his wood with an occasional clear-heart fence post for a hull—all carved by hand. Amazing!
When I knew he was in his workshop, I would climb the fence and knock on his door and he would follow with a warm, “Come in, Ronnie.” He always seemed glad to see me. I suppose he appreciated having someone who was interested in how he had spent his life. At the time, he simply went about his business with me asking questions, watching his every movement, staring in amazement at what those crooked hands could create at age 89. I was his student, he my professor without a word ever to acknowledge the instructive neighborly relationship we shared living next to each other. He was never overbearing or arrogant about what he knew. He was a kind and gentle soul, quiet, humble, and patient.
Sometimes he would work and I would watch for the longest times without saying a word. Ours was not a forceful instruction based on any lesson plans or educational stratagems. Instead, it was a rather low-key, casual “learn by doing and observation,” backfilled with bits of information he alone possessed. I think my interest developed simply because he was interested, skilled, and patient and had such wonderful stories of ships and the sea he knew so well. He had so much to offer that I could not have learned from anyone in my family. I was thoroughly intrigued.
Just before he passed on, he gave me two square-rigged schooners, a couple of ships in bottles, and a large model of a small luxury liner he had made. Then, he was gone, lost to the world from which he had come, taking with him the skill, knowledge, and stories that only a handful of men possessed. I recall going into my bedroom, closing the door, and crying for what seemed like hours. Almost immediately, I began to realize the void in my life, but not yet realizing I would carry it for the rest of my days. There is something about spending time with a master teacher that never leaves you. I stared at those ships for years following his death, admiring his work and recalling his stories, with no idea then of what he had done for me.
Much later, in my early 30s, I found myself naturally drawn to harbors, boats, ships, and chandleries, woodworking, and, more importantly, the sea. One day, I began carving an old Italian-style salmon troller I had seen in Monterey harbor and I drifted back to Giuseppe. Unknowingly, he had planted a few grains of magic sand in me that would become pearls years later—and in a fashion come to honor his memory, his craft. Now, after having spent much of my life fishing and sailing and guiding natural history trips along the bays and outer shoreline of California and serving as a shipboard naturalist in southeast Alaska, I spend a few hours carving from scratch the ships of my own heart and experience. As time and work would have it, my hands are beginning to look like Giuseppe’s bent, cracked, and a bit knobby. It feels like he is still alive somewhere near me.
Now, I didn’t become a ship engineer or designer and I certainly didn’t grow up to own a shipping enterprise. But I did grow up with an immutable fondness for the sea and everything related. The greatest gift Giuseppe had given me were those grains of interest, enthusiasm, and encouragement, so small in the beginning, so beyond my grasp I could never have imagined that they would grow into the pearls that have kept me excited and given me great pleasure all these years. From scuba diving and underwater photography, from fishing and sailing to teaching countless students and docents about intertidal ecology, and finally writing articles and books on various ocean-related topics, I have spent much of my life experiencing and sharing the sea. I wonder how different my life would have been without those treasured times with Giuseppe.
So, it occurs to me that some of the greatest life-changing moments and lessons are softly planted by those of us who take a moment to listen to a youngster, to allow them to share their thoughts and interests, and to share something that comes from their passion and ours. We may be accidental mentors or consciously reach out. The student may come to us or we to them. It matters not, for it is the quality of the time together. It seems to me that the simplest question from or to a child—“What are you doing?”—is a spark of interest that opens the door to one of those grand moments or to a series of them that develop much later. I wonder how many of you have had a Giuseppe in your lives. How many of you are like Giuseppe in your own manner? And painfully, how many children out there desperately need a Giuseppe to help them avoid the dungeons of a life without inspiration, motivation, or encouragement?
Whether a parent, neighbor, or naturalist, it seems so critical that we are constantly alert, ready and willing to act on that tiny spark of interest. Children today, more than ever, need mentors. There seem to be so many bright youngsters that need to be taken under the wing of a master craftsman or just a caring adult. Whether it is with our own children, grandchildren, or the children we will only see once on the trail, we can plant the same kind of magic grains of sand that turn into pearls if we relax, take the time, listen, and encourage their interests, or softly share our passion. The demands of being an adult, no matter how crazy or pressing they may seem at the moment, are really not more important than the too often fleeting seconds when the window is open in a child. Inspiring children need not be rocket science.
Ron Russo is a retired chief naturalist with the East Bay Regional Park District (California). He is a founding member of NAI and was honored with the prestigious NAI Fellow award in 1989.