Lithgow - The poets corner: the one-and-only poetry book for the whole family

copyright 2007 by The Watershed Company.

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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First eBook Edition: November 2007

ISBN: 978-0-446-50199-6

To Mary

Acknowledgments

Thanks, first of all, to Robin Dellabough, Lisa DiMona, and Flynn Berry at Lark Productions and especially Karen Watts for their tireless efforts on The Poets Corner. Thanks to Nancy Cushing-Jones, Barbara Weller, and Cynthia Clevelandthe women of Broadthinkfor the original instinct to create the book. Additional thanks to Les Pockell for his editorial insights.

To Readers, Young and Old

I grew up with poems.

All of us did, whether we realize it or not. Poetry is in our bloodstream: nursery rhymes, schoolyard chants, song lyrics, limericks, jingles, rap. But not many of us think of ourselves as poetry lovers. The very question Do you love poetry? makes most of us nervous. It shouldnt. Poetry is a part of us. The purpose of this book is to remind people, young and old, of that simple fact.

The fifty poets Ive chosen for the book are vastly different from one another. Indeed, they have only two things in common: they wrote in English and their work survives them. They lived on different continents, in different eras, their work is old and new, romantic and savage, comic and gloomy, orderly and chaotic, long and short. The poems are presented alphabetically, by their authors last names. If you read them in sequence, youll travel a crazy, unpredictable journey, lurching back and forth through the centuries. My brief comments reflect what the poems have meant to me, but they speak far more resonantly for themselves.

Oh, yes. The poets have one other thing in common. I love them all.

I can trace my love of poetry back to my childhood, and to my grandmother, Ina B. Lithgow. Grammy was born late in the nineteenth century and grew up on the island of Nantucket. Hers was one of the last generations to make the memorization and recitation of poems an integral part of a childs education. In her late eighties she could still remember all the words to countless epic poems, such as Longfellows The Wreck of the Hesperus. My brother, my sisters, and I would sit at her feet and beg her to recite. Her dark brown eyes would twinkle, she would tilt her head back, fold her hands in her lap, and begin to speak in a gentle, even voice. She would recite for as long as forty minutes. Incredibly, I never remember her missing a syllable.

One of our favorites was The Deacons Masterpiece or, the Wonderful One-hoss Shay, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. It is a saga about a deluxe horse-drawn buggy, made of the finest leather, wood, and brass, built to last. Not a thing goes wrong with it until the exact day, hour, minute, and second that it turns one hundred years old. All at once and without warning, the wonderful one-hoss shay flies into a million pieces. I can still hear my Grammys voice reciting the last stanza:

What do you think the parson found,

When he got up and stared around?

The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,

As if it had been to the mill and ground!

You see, of course, if youre not a dunce,

How it went to pieces all at once,

All at once, and nothing first,

Just as bubbles do when they burst.

End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.

Logic is logic. Thats all I say.

Oh, how I loved the story, the rhymes, the meter, that accent, and that voice! And, although I cant say for sure, my seven-year-old brain must have had some inkling of the metaphorical power of the moment. Here was my elderly grandmother performing mental feats that I would never be capable of. I must have been aware that I would lose her soon, but surely I did not imagine her razor-sharp mind ever failing hernot until the very end. Perhaps it was my first poetic insight: my Grammy was the wonderful one-hoss shay!

Then there was my dad. Grammy must have passed on her poetry- loving genes to my father, for he devoted half of his professional life to producing Shakespeares plays in a succession of theater festivals in Ohio. As a result, my own childhood was awash in Elizabethan verse. And although my dad poured most of his energy into rehearsals and performances, we usually had him to ourselves at bedtime. He would read aloud to us from either the funny papers, from a fat collection of stories called Tellers of Tales, from Kiplings Jungle Book, or, best of all, from a series of bright orange volumes for kids called Childcraft.

One of the Childcraft books was a collection of poems. It mostly featured loopy verse by doggerel poets such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. None of the poems was especially complex or challenging, but we would request them over and over again. I can still rattle off several lines from memory:

Once there was an elephant

Who tried to use the telephant;

No no, I mean an elephone

Who tried to use the telephone....

Or my favorite:

I never saw a purple cow,

I never hope to see one;

But I can tell you anyhow:

Id rather see than be one.

I remember my fathers exact inflections, his husky smell, the scratchy wool of our burnt orange couch. My father was a genial man, but slightly abstracted. He lived his life with his head halfway in the clouds. But when my sibs and I cuddled up to him and listened to those poems, we were never closer.

Those bedtime hours primed me for all the poetry I encountered later on, in high school and college English classes. Nonsense verses gave way to the metaphysical poets, the cavalier poets, the Romantic poets. Instead of telephants and purple cows, I discovered Donne, Herrick, Coleridge, Poe. I embraced these poets with a swoony, youthful exuberance. I felt as if they were speaking directly to me from centuries past. I remember declaiming Walt Whitman to my first girlfriend, pronouncing Marvells To His Coy Mistress the perfect poem, memorizing Keatss ode To Autumn on a golden fall day in New England. As a student actor, I appeared in plays by T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and William Butler Yeats, drunk with the power of their words.

None of this made me an authority on poetry, nor even much of a scholar. But it made me a poetry lover, a lifelong seeker of poetic experience, whether reading, reciting, or listening to great poems.

I once witnessed firsthand just how intense the experience of poetry can be. The story bears repeating, because it partly inspired this book.

Ten years ago, a married couple asked me to host a benefit for a nonprofit organization they had founded in a town eighty miles from my home. The request came at a time when I was busy and overextended, so I hesitated. But when my wife told me that these people were good friends of hers, I accepted their invitation. A few days later, the couple called again, asking me to recite some poems during the benefit. They said they would choose them for me. Once again I dutifully agreed. When the evening arrived, I quickly skimmed the poems they had chosen before setting off with my wife.

The fund-raiser was for an organization that fostered creative approaches to educating autistic children. Every single person at the event was the parent of at least one autistic child. The couple themselves had had three, one of whom had died young. Considering these poignant facts, the atmosphere at the banquet was amazingly lighthearted and festive. Everyone was cheerful and energized, none more so than my two new friends.