I think there’s something to be said about one’s constantly evolving tastes in media. It’s one of the reasons I really do find enjoyment from rewatching movies or television shows, or rereading books. Sometimes, it’s a practice in emotional masochism—the pain of finding out that something hasn’t quite aged as well as you like. Other times, it’s an exploration into self. The beauty of really great works of art is in their ability to reveal themselves differently under different circumstances. This is true of a painting seen in studio versus daylight, a novel reread every year where one finds certain passages more biting than others, and in the joy and misery of looking back on poems one has read years ago.
I have liked poetry longer than I have understood poetry, if I can claim to understand poetry at all. This has something to do with how I got into poetry—Poetry Out Loud competitions in high school being a chance to practice and hone my oration skills (one of the few talents of mine I will actually praise). At the time, poetry was a source of endlessly erudite and calculated words to recite with forced meaning and await applause. I say this obviously demonstrating the high opinion I have of my high school self.
But it says something, too, that the poem which brought me nearest to beating my erstwhile rival, a person for whom writing, life, poetry, and all their interconnected, complicated joys and woes remain fore in our relationship, was “Ego” by Denise Duhamel. Reading it then conjured all the things I thought I wanted out of poetry, and maybe out of life. Because, to a certain type of high-school student, there are no more beautiful thoughts and words than something to the effect of:
I used to think that if I could only concentrate hard enough
I could be the one person to feel what no one else could,
sense a small tug from the ground, a sky shift, the earth changing gears.
Not to mention the pleasure of actually reciting them, and meaning it.
Now, rereading “Ego,” I find it almost a conciliatory conversation with my former self—if we can acknowledge that a divide exists between periods of immense growth. Because, of course, the nature of life and the nature of one’s teens is in that grasping, reaching, striving. I’ve ambition and work enough, sure, with short stories and novels and actual bartending and sommelier-ing occurring all the time. But I find myself thinking less about what it would mean to be god, “the force/who spins the planets the way I spin a globe.” I won’t go so far as to cast myself as one of the people the poem describes as “[having] an understanding of the excruciating crawl of the world”, but it’s something like it.
I think the beauty of realizing that, no, “Ego,” our mothers were not the only ones who snapped that the world does not revolve around us is in the liberation both from that kind of pressured ambition, as I would recast that wanton drive from high school, and from the way such pressures force one to miss out on just the experience of living. What that liberation accomplishes is giving one the time to actually slow down and enjoy life, what one has, without envying the kid the teacher chose to hold the fruit in the front of the class in what can be recast as a lifetime ago. It’s a different way of grasping ‘this whole citrus universe,” and one which I encourage.
It's also adjusted my interpretation of poetry. Naturally, reading more poetry has done that, too. I will always encourage mor reading as a solution to figuring oneself out, because the joy of literature and poetry and quotes is the chance run-in with someone who has already surmised and summarized your own thoughts in perhaps a better, or more sympathetic, way. I’ve written before that art is sympathy, and I think that’s honestly one of my maxims. Good art, therefore, must practice good sympathy.
Poetry is at its best, in my current opinion (and how will I look back and judge this?) when it captures the magical in the mundane. Duhamel’s does this—seizing the grandiose thoughts of every gifted student who desired to play god. While at the time I saw it as relevant insight, and although now it reads and conciliation and understanding, its honesty remains apparent.
But as I have grown, and slowed, and hopefully understood more about myself and the world around me, I find myself appreciating more the less grand, but no less meaningful, poems. The problem with unrelenting drive and ambition, especially when one ties productivity to self-worth, is the invariable rise of burnout and exhaustion. I have had my bouts with each, and with harmful thoughts and deep, dragging darkness. Through no small effort of myself and my friends and family who love and support me, I have persevered.
I remember, and it seems now one of those seminal moments, the first time I read Wendy Cope’s “The Orange.” I think I cried. Even now, among my friends, I describe the feeling the poem evokes as “an orange mood.” It has the everything I’ve written of above, and then some. There is magic, and joy, in the mundanity of it.
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.
What’s more—at the time and even now, it’s hopeful. When I read it, and cried, it was almost out of a sense of longing, I think. It was as though I had lost what the poem had described when, really, I don’t think I had found it yet. I’m still not sure I have, and setting these two citrus-themed poems side by side has me thinking about the constantly conflicting drives one has over the course of a life. But Cope captures well those sparks of genuine happiness that seem to simply happen when given the chance. That an entire poem, that an entire state of being, should be so sparked by an orange whose size simply makes everyone laugh…
I think of all the stupid little things we do when we’re happy, and stupid is by no means a pejorative here. Those things like loading up on snacks before a road trip, hopping on top of a rock in the middle of a city street because we think it’s going to be funny, doing a dance when we notice our favorite song’s playing in the background of a supermarket or restaurant that just… happen. A beam of sunlight from a cloudy sky. They need not be anything more than an ephemeral prick of light, but our acknowledging them, our ability to slow down and notice them and smile for our noticing, is what makes them special.
There is poetry’s mundane magic.
Now, in conversation, I feel even more Duhamel’s understanding of drive and Cope’s settling, sympathetic breath. To an extent, there lingers that feeling of speaking to a former self and in another, a happy swirl acknowledging the want of greatness and its temperance in the small things that keep it afloat. These are not necessarily opposing forces, nor are they even really in conflict with one another. That’s part of life too, the reconciliation of the vastness of a person and the myriad of truths borne of experience.
The earth was fragile and mostly water,
just the way the orange was mostly water if you peeled it,
just the way I was mostly water if you peeled me.
I did all the jobs on my list.
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.