"At Least it Requires Awe..."

     Du-oh!  We're already 12 days into National Poetry Month and I haven't said a word about it yet.  My lofty ambition is to post something everyday this month related to my favorite art form, unless napping is an art form.

     Today I was ordering books for a fall course on British poetry and trying to decide who to include on the syllabus.  Leafing through Derek Walcott's Collected Poems, I remembered a crazy night many years ago shouting some of these poems out of a car window as the Dudette drove us down an empty Texas highway. We needed protection, a talisman, something to ward off the evil spirits of what we feared might be wide open spaces and tiny, closed minds.  So, like a lunatic, I start reading aloud.  First, just in the car, then with the windows rolled down, then hollerin' and carryin' on, declaiming Walcott's words to our amusement and to the certain dread of surrounding cattle and the occasional bewildered farmer.

  Poetry makes people weird.

  Not that Walcott is weird at all.  Oh, far from it.  He's a Caribbean poet, Nobel Prize winner, and the author of such lines as, "Things do not explode, / they fail, they fade" in a poem aptly titled "Endings."  That one always gets me.

  In "Volcano" he suggests that one could give up writing and become the ideal reader of the great writers instead:  "At least it requires awe / which has been lost to our time."  And then he delivers his one-two punch:

so many people have seen everything,
so many people can predict,
so many refuse to enter the silence
of victory, the indolence
that burns at the core,
so many are no more than
erect ash, like the cigar,
so many take thunder for granted.
How common is the lightning,
how lost the leviathans
we no longer look for!
There were giants in those days.
In those days they made good cigars.
I must read more carefully.

  I used to hand out this poem on the first day of any class so the little tykes might actually read (much less carefully). "How lost the leviathans we no longer look for!"  Now there's a line. 

  However, if you want to be blown away, run, don't walk, to your nearest Google and read "Love After Love."  It. Will. Rock. Your. World.  It's a leviathan, a talisman.  It is the silence of victory itself.  Money-back guarantee.