Brad Leithauser - Rhymes Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry

Im hoping to attract the specialist: the practicing poet, the high-minded critic, the esteemed professor. But none of these is the primary target of this book. I want to lure here, more than anyone else, the reader who loves words and literature but maybe feels some trepidation, and a little nervous resentment, as well as various unvoiced cravings, on confronting a poem on a page.

Over the years, a passion for twentieth-century American popular song has led me to publish essays on Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, Johnny Mercer, Stephen Sondheim et al. In the following pages I often look to them for illumination and example. For many readers of advancing years, these have been the modern poets most closely lived beside, and loved beside. We all owe them, and Im happily seeking to repay a long-standing debt.

Biologists employ a term for creatures like frogs or salamanders: They are indicator species. Their well-being, or lack of it, is a reflection of the broader conditions governing the environment. You want to know if your marshland is thriving or dying? Look to the frogs.

And you want to know if a literary marshland is thriving? Look to the poets, and the poetry readers, who together compose a froglike indicator species. Their croaking alerts us to the overall vigor of our ecosystem. If while croaking theyre croaking, so are a host of other creatures, including both writers and fans of short stories, novels, literary essays, even personal memoirs. Where poetry languishes, every book lover should feel pangs of foreboding.

I mean this book as a modest dose of medicinesupplied to a literary culture not always fully appreciative of those solitary figures, besieged and fumbling, who spend their days with poetic structures, pondering how some small handful of words might be grouped, or regrouped, or grouped once more, to engineer a satisfying line.

FOREWORD:

A FIRST STEP, A FIRST STOP

All poems begin by saying the same thing. It doesnt matter if the poem is written in your native language, or in a language acquired later in life, or even in one in which youre wordless. It doesnt matter if the writing goes from left to right, or right to left, or descends vertically down the page. The first message it sends you is Slow down. It asks to be read less hurriedly than you typically read.

If the poem is in English, its likely to be justified (aligned vertically) along its left margin. Its right margin, though, will be rutted and raggedylike a rumble strip on a highway. That ragged edge is a series of little speed bumps telling you, the driver/reader, to take your foot off the accelerator. And to wake up fully if youve begun to drowse.

CHAPTER ONE

Meeting the Funesians

Let us begin with a tribe of people residing high in the Andes Mountains, where the brisk air is thin and vistas are arrestingly clear. Well call them the Funesians. They are a small and in many ways unexceptional community, subsisting mostly on boiled potatoes and pickled turnips and a mild rhubarb brandy. Days roll by, decades pass, marked chiefly by a gratified uneventfulness. The Funesians are remarkable in only one aspect, really: They are, far and away, the finest readers of poetry in the world. They hear things the rest of us dont hear. The question this book poses is what can youwhether you live in New York or London, in Johannesburg or Jakarta, in a tidal shack or a yurt or a submarine or a castlelearn from the Funesians?

Plenty, I think. In their modest but dizzying excellence, the Funesians instruct and enlighten us about our limitations as readers and thinkers. Perhaps all art is an expression of human restlessness against our bodily confines and of our adaptations within them; perhaps every art form is an arena for measuring the mettle of our physiological and mental capabilities. Even so, poetrylike its sister arts music and architectureis a medium that constantly brings this testing into sharp relief, with pointed and poignant models.