01/24/99

By Tom Mayo

January is the month for fresh starts, when the stirrings of hope and renewal haven't yet been stilled by unforgiving February. (In other words, we still can remember our New Year's resolutions and believe them to be achievable.) Here are some of my poetic resolutions for 1999:

1. Attend a poetry slam. There's no accounting for it, and I am not proud of it: I simply haven't been to one, and it is long overdue. Slams have rekindled Americans' interest in poetry by turning it into a competitive sport. My own preference is to read poetry in a quiet room with a glass of cabernet handy, not in a saloon with beers after each round, but hey, why be hidebound about such things? Club Clearview, here I come.

2. Figure out "prose poems." We can thank the French for the oxymoronically named "prose poem." Essentially free verse without the line breaks, is what's left really "poetry" or simply well-written prose? Does the answer matter? Does the question matter? Yes, to both questions, and this is the year I try to figure out why.

Catching beauty with a net of rules

3. Write a decent villanelle. The villanelle is the poet's Everest. It is the highly structured poetic form that is perhaps most familiar to us through Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." The rhyme scheme is unforgiving (aba aba aba aba aba abaa), and on top of that, the pattern of repeating lines must be scrupulously observed (the first line of the first stanza is repeated at the end of the second and fourth stanzas and in the third line of the last stanza, the third line of the first stanza is repeated at the end of the third, fifth and sixth stanzas). Although more than 400 years old, the villanelle has attracted modern practitioners such as W.H. Auden ("If I Could Tell You"), Theodore Roethke ("The Waking"), Sylvia Plath ("Denouement") and Elizabeth Bishop (the wonderful "One Art"). The villanelle is more than a writing-workshop exercise: By taking away our decisions about structure and rhyme, it forces us to pay infinitely close attention to the sounds of individual words and to the marriage of sound, form and meaning. That doesn't make the villanelle unique, since all poetry is about this, but the degree of difficulty forces the mind wonderfully. Even if I fail at this, which seems likely, I expect to learn something about the poet's craft.

4. Read Bill Moyers' The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets. I suppose I always thought I would catch this one on PBS or rent the tape, but sometimes Mr. Moyers is just a bit too earnest, so I've avoided the program on which this book is based. Still, getting poets to talk about what they do is a great service to us all. I love my copy of Poets at Work, a Paris Review collection of interviews with 16 of this century's greatest poets. And I constantly recommend David Lehman's Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 85 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems, which has all the virtues of Poets at Work plus the additional virtue of still being in print. It's time to give Mr. Moyers' book its due, and that begins by reading it.

It's good for you, but you'll like it anyway

5. Share more poetry with my kids. My wife teaches third grade, and her students run, not walk, to the poetry table after recess. They have their favorites, of course, but are open to new poems, too. In this, they are like most children, who are as drawn to strong rhythms and rhymes as they are to the subversiveness of Shel Silverstein or the silliness of Ogden Nash and Mary Ann Hoberman. Somewhere along the way, however, most kids learn to shy away from poetry. Is it because of countless hours in a junior high school English class, slogging through a poetry curriculum that follows the "castor oil principle" (of course it's unpleasant, but it's good for them)? Or is it that no one ever assured us that it was OK if we didn't exactly "get" a particular poem in its entirety? My recollection of high school poetry classes resembles these lines from Billy Collins' "Introduction to Poetry": "But all they want to do/is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it.//They begin beating it with a hose/to find out what it really means." And history has repeated itself in my own family. Boys, the bad news is that in 1999 we are going to be doing some poetry together as a family. The good news is: It's going to be fun.

Last month I introduced a feature of this column that I want to continue in 1999: a recommendation of a book about poetry for readers who want a refresher course in the basics of reading or writing poetry. This month's selection is by Mary Oliver: A Poetry Handbook (Harcourt Brace, $11). It is a reliable guide and comfortable companion for all manner of poetic undertaking, by a master poet and teacher.

Guest columnist Tom Mayo is associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University. He teaches "Law, Literature and Medicine" at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and at the law school.

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