|
The Danger and Usefulness of Poetry
Perhaps You Could Breathe For Me, Martina Reisz Newberry, 2009, 93pp.)
Rap is about what's happening in the hood, it's about The Man happening to the hood. Algerian
rai is similarly the voice of an underclass explaining itself to itself and to the rest of us.
What if we had neighbors chanting to us about themselves, their lives and even their perceptions
of us? What if? That's exactly what we have: rap, rai, country, rock. Poetry is far more popular
than most of us believe. We don't know it because we define poetry too narrowly. Here's a
California poet who shows us the error of our ways.
Rather like a child who bursts through the front door after school and starts telling us about her day. Her mother says, Sing it, dear, sing it.
How would the child sing it? Well, it would depend on how musical she is, of course. But we know from overhearing children at play
that chanting what's on their minds comes naturally to them. They can play hopscotch and chant at the same time. They can
taunt each other musically. They can dance and sing for joy.
Each child has his own voice, a timbre, a sound, a demeanor, but there's a common language and usually a regional accent.
Martina Reisz Newberry's poetry has the spontaneity, the impishness and the innocence of a reliably daunting friend,
the kind who gives voice to just what you're thinking but also the kind who says that one thing you don't want to hear
at the very moment you least want to hear it. The sort of poet, in fact, who is obsessed with the elephant in the room
that everyone else pretends not to see.
She's that rare poet who in early old age regularly crosses the bridge back to her youth
and middle age: Who says lies are ugly? That's bullshit, she says in Sleeping Goddess.
The unlit rooms in my head keep them safe, she continues.
I dreamed
of Tenderness,
that poor cripple
dragging herself
down an empty road.
—This is her tribute to Tupac Shakur in a poem called For Real. She had been moved by his dictum, Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real.
Newberry is an inconvenient poet, and this probably stands between her and wider recognition. Many poets talk
or sing, as the case may be, of seemingly homely things—grandpa's spectacles, the old homestead, eetc.—in deference
to William Carlos Williams'red wheelbarrrow—but Newberry is a ruthless rearranger of the furniture of thee heart.
You never know what damned thing she's going to do or say, a dangerous friend for being so trustworthy.
In rereading her poetry—first readings are like first sightings at sea, subject too your own movements on deck—I
have sometimes felt she had crammedd and shuffled a poem or two into a poetic shape, made it look like a poem,
in other words. I'm especially wary of this phenomenon because it seems to me all too common. But I always
see that the form she has chosen comes from the whimsicality of her thought process, from the interplay
of her breathing and her dialogue with herself. If there's a spondee it's not because it's required by
a preconception but because her body gave it up in an effort to form a recognition.
Poetry is useful, much more useful than today's news, because it empowers reader and writer to sort things
out, to make sense in the largest and most daring context. The news is always old news before you get it,
but poetry is always opening new ground, even the third and fourth time around.
Many people say they don't get poetry, but what they don't get is that their own interior dialogue,
the two voices within their own minds—the self and the one to whom the self speaks in order to understand
itself—is poetry. People who donâ't get poetry are often people who prefer not to be in touch with themselves
for fear of what they might hear. Poetry is a natural way to make sense of things. Newberry's work throws open
a window on this truth. When you read her poems you understand that you yourself are a poet, that poetry is
going on in your mind all the time. That explains the power of rap and rai, and it explains the durability
through the ages of poetry. It's not prettied up speech, it's not stylized language; it's the language with
which you address yourself, the dialogue that enables you make sense of what you encounter. In a sense,
it's the language we dare not speak for the consequences, but when we do speak it we recognize it as
far more daring and elegant than our ordinary banter.
Poetry challenges us to tell the truth, to ourselves first of all, and then to everyone else. Often those
who say they don't get it really mean they're afraid of the consequences of saying what we mean and meaning what we say.
Don't take my word for it. Test this thesis by reading Perhaps You Could Breathe For Me. —DM
Martina Reisz Newberry's Web Site
Djelloul Marbrook Djelloul Marbrook’s book of poems, Far From Algiers, is the 2007 winner of Kent State University’s
Stan and Tom Wick First Book Prize in poetry. It was selected by Prof. Toi Derricotte of the University of
Pittsburgh and was released in August 2008, His short story, "Artists Hill", won the Literal Latté K. Margaret
Grossman Fiction Award in the spring of 2008. Djelloul Marbrook Web Site
Email: Djelloul Marbrook
Return to Table of Contents
|
