The Art of Collecting Poetry

By Brian Paul Allison

This book is truly a love-service of noteworthy magnitude. To memorize hundreds of poems and then arrange them into sequences, creating gems of intertextuality, and then to go out into the world and offer this as an example of the newest form of an ancient practice, to get up in front of people and recite... well, it is a scary yet enormously rewarding thing to do. On either side of the equation, this can result in truly bringing the poetry to life in your life. It's like, if you have a relationship with poetry, this is how to deepen that love affair, obviously, slowly over time, even clandestinely... how can that be? Read this book and find out!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Paul Allison
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310422683

Brian Paul Allison

I am an artist, author, and inspirationalist. I follow a path of holistic health and creativity. I recite poetry from memory in a process I call Poetry Theater (tour de force). My current project is a solo presentation of Shakespeare's 12th Night, abridged and modified as if told through the eyes of Fester, the Jester...

Book preview

Introduction

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you... or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore..."

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

There is a simple improv theater exercise called the Opinion Game, which is more of a warm-up or ice-breaker type of activity to get a group of people into the flow of playing together. The facilitator and players take turns calling out different things, or categories of things, that the group then responds to by going to stand in one of the four quadrants of the room designated as: I Don’t Like It, in one corner; I Like It, in an adjacent corner; I Love It in the next corner, and then, of course, I Hate It, in the last. It’s fun to see where people choose to go when asked to show how they feel about various things, even simple things like eating anchovies, shopping in the mall, listening to classical music, watching science-fiction movies, etc. But what about on the question of how you feel regarding poetry, where do you go?

Do we have any poetry lovers in the room? Given the title of the work, I assume so. The determination is entirely subjective, but the point is to ask the question, and to give your own definitive answer to it. Basically, if you spend some of your time with verse in any form, tending to that inner fire, in reading, writing, or in the act of collecting favorite poems—which is like gathering wood for a bigger blaze—you might just be a poetry lover. Even if you only have a passing interest in the subject and are more of a poetry liker, maybe this text will give you an automatic upgrade to higher states of appreciation.

Indeed, mine may be a very select audience, but that is perhaps all the more reason to make this connection, from this place here at the keyboard—where my cat has just jumped up onto the desktop and rubbed his eager little chin against the back of my left hand while I type this.

If, in my little Opinion Game scenario, you went to the quadrant of the poetry disliker, you might want to abandon ship right now because my waxing poetical is only beginning—though I would love it if you would stick around, and maybe get pulled at least a little bit in this direction. If you hate poetry, I don’t know what to tell you, and you probably aren’t reading this anyway, so never mind. I certainly hope that’s the least crowded quadrant in the room. If you are totally indifferent, maybe climb to the top mast with me, on this ship of syntactical fools, and get a better view. But I am mainly speaking to my fellow poetry lovers. Life is too short to bother with people who just don’t get it anyway. I’m here to have fun, and to play.

Cogito ergo sono (I think, therefore I make a noise/sing/celebrate words). I hope for you that reading this book can be something like arriving at a poetry party, a cerebral celebration, a philology-fest, an imaginational inebriation—party hats for everyone!

There seems to be something worth our time and mental energy in this thoughtful, playful, often profound and evocative use of language; there seems to be something important—as if maybe there really is such a thing as wisdom-poetry. Coleman Barks wrote, in the The Soul of Rumi, No one can say what the inner life is, but poetry tries to, and no one can say what poetry is.

I believe poetry can be rather like a crack in the prison wall of our limited consciousness. Or with an image more suited to our theme, a sailing vessel that carries us to lands away—great poetry, that is. One might even say there is potentially a kind of magic in great literature, a vital treasure that connects us through time and space in a form of literary telepathy, a kind of text-driven time-traveling that takes place on the page, reaching through the dimensions with its linguistic illuminations and softening the existential aloneness. I hope so.

That’s partly why I decided to start collecting poetry more seriously, many years ago, and why I am writing this memoirette now. To me, it’s all a form of singing the commingling of souls through language, the written word, and especially poetry—great poetry, that is.

The ease of access to poetic material in the modern world makes collecting poems one of the most user-friendly hobbies, especially with the internet and word processors. The digital age was made for this pastime. The enormity of poetry is all around us,. often lying dormant, waiting to inspire us. Therefore, my goal is to challenge you a little bit as we go along, from the standpoint of the contemporary poetry-collecting-hobbyist. Think of this as what I bring to the party. The main point is that this kind of thing is just a lot of fun, and I need to tell you about my version of it. So I simply offer these ideas on serving up the old Odin’s mead in the spirit of playful creativity. Take me up on them at your own peril of increased poetic pleasure.

Maybe I am running the risk of coming across with solipsistic chuckleheadedness, giving the impression that I believe poetry can be some kind of panacea. No. Even the greatest poetry doesn’t quite satisfy the deepest longings of the psyche, in this hard and often bleak world where pessimism is probably more appropriate. Poetry usually doesn’t even put much food on the table, for that matter. For me, it’s sometimes more of a love-hate relationship. Probably why, one of my heroes, William Gass wrote, Poetry is cathartic only for the unserious.

I understand that, on one hand, this pastime is of limited importance, and can even be suspect at times. As Marianne Moore said in one of her most famous poems, Poetry, I, too, dislike it... wherein she recommends having not just scepticism but a perfect contempt for it, so that beyond shallow sentimentality we may discover the genuine... to find, imaginary gardens with real toads in them.

On the other hand there is something transcendental when poetry reminds us that the poetry itself is not enough, that the real art is in the living of life, and in the loving of one another. A great statement on this, and staying with the earthen imagery, is when Rumi says, These words pile up while the real work is done by someone outside digging in the ground.

While insufficient in itself, poetic meditation can move us up the emotional and vibrational scale. And I’ll take all the help I can get. So this book is the result of my decision that I’m not going to let the inadequacy of language, or the bad poetry, or nihilistic arguments, or the limitations of my understanding, or the sheer impracticality of it all, stop me from more fully revelling in the good stuff, as I see it, while I can. Enjoying the process and loving the material. In other words, as stated by Theodore Roethke, You must believe: a poem is a holy thing—a good poem, that is.

It’s a matter of poetic faith. Suspending disbelief, investing your mind into the experience of it, whether reading a poem, seeing Hamlet on the stage, or Hugh Jackman as Wolverine on the screen, watching a dancer, or viewing a piece of art for that matter, always involves the same kind of open-mindedness. Shakespeare’s Prologue to Henry V enjoins, And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, on your imaginary forces work... For tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings...

Great poetry can crown our consciousness with an internal beauty, empowering the imaginal force with an element of grace, if not a sense of mystical union at times. Given the random harshness of the world, endless greed, endless wars and whatnot, living in some way that keeps the arts alive is as heroic an endeavor as ever, and is to support one of humanity’s redeeming qualities—outnumbered as they are. Like the old woman who was seen peeing in the ocean said, Every little bit helps.

And so, along with humor, and poetry, all the arts are like jewels in the diadem of existence, that which makes survival worth the surviving, that which elevates us from an animal condition, that which even now distinguishes us from robots on an assembly line, and that which looks toward a distant, more evolved state of being, perhaps angelic, imagined, intuited, or otherwise. Or not. Words are powerful; words are limited. These are the strands that make up the rope of poetry, to get tangled in and bind yourself with, or to rig the masts on the ship and fill the sails on your way to some yonder shore—it’s up to you.

Just as the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so the collection of a thousand poems begins with a single line. I think it is beautifully apt that my collection, as I have arranged it alphabetically, starts with a piece by Anna Ahkmatova: A Land Not Mine / Still forever memorable, the water of its oceans chill and fresh...

It’s too bad this public domain version cannot include the poem in its entirety, but there is still some really fine nectar here to be harvested and squeezed, skillfully, if at all possible, so as not to make a real mess; that will be the trick, because life is messy, after all—but hey, how about a thick and frothy, dripping with succulence, metaphorical-mango smoothie?

Muse-Juice. Yummy!

Collecting

It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting [sea]shells than to be born a millionaire.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

My wife and I have a cat; his name is Chicken, Mr. Chicken on formal occasions; otherwise he might be called: Chickpea, Chicklet, Chicken Little, and Chickeebumbum, among other things. He’s an all white short-hair with big blue eyes. His intent stare has been my audience, many a time and oft, while I’ve practiced reciting the poetry in this book. He seems to understand the material, instinctually, and he responds to the sounds of the lines and their emotional tones, with subtleties of body language, and little facial expressions, purring like a background sound of applause, sometimes with a certain look in his eyes—sometimes not so subtle, such as when breaking into a full face-stretching-yawn, without even trying to disguise it, sometimes licking himself at the slightest provocation, or with the tilt of his ears and the spread of a few whiskers, he can change the entire tone of his commentary, and so I adjust my inflections accordingly. One day, recently, after what I thought was a solid delivery of Wordsworth’s The Kitten and the Falling Leaves, he told me through shifting his weight side to side, and the look in his cool-powder-blue eyes, with a kind of echoed feeling forming words in my mind, saying something like: Pounce on your writing as if it were a scampering mouse. Use your claws man!

You see, I have been wanting to scribe this for a while, and had started many times, but I always put it down unsatisfied with my efforts—as the lamp shade reflected back to me as much with a sober, flat and dusty surface, dulling the illumination. I looked down at the cat again, as he came over and brushed up against my leg. I could feel his steady purring, that lovely vibratory expression, feline poetry in its own right, and then he gave a cute little meow with a rising lilt that suggested hopefulness.

Welcome to my collection of favorite poems and fragments. Every poetry lover should have one. Maybe you already do. After all, people collect all kinds of things, why not poetry? It’s fun and fairly easy too. Not everyone can collect vintage automobiles, but poetry is there for everyone. Seriously, as simple as it is, it’s one of those things that is readily available and it’s just a matter of availing yourself of it, and once you have a collection, then the fun begins, bringing the poetry to life in your life. I want the poetic seeds of inspiration to sprout, grow, and blossom in your experience, and to enhance our shared participation in the world of the intellectual imagination through specific stages in what you might call a personal anthology project. If anthology seems a bit large for your aspirations, start out as a chapbook-sized effort and see where it goes. Nowadays, personal handheld devices allow for the largest of poetry collections to fit in your pocket, with room left over for a small town library and all your music.

Noted scholars have at times set out to determine a social canon, and there are literary critics who can expound upon numerous important works with alacrity. I make no such claims, and bow to their authority. I am just a guy who likes to play with poetry, and I’ve spent some time creating a personal canon. No credentials required, just an enjoyment in the selection process, a heuristic connoisseurship. Just a poetry lover who is willing to put some work into the relationship—the result of which, is to become an honorary, imaginary-card-carrying-member of the Personal Anthology Club (or whatever you want to call it).

The membership card is like a ticket to ride the ride, or like a passport, as in Emily Dickenson’s, No Frigate Like a Book, to take us lands away,. (this, by the way, was the very first poem I decided to collect when I was a freshman in high school). And the gathering up of favorites is only the beginning of the journey, because then the pieces can be played with, categorized and arranged into sequences, allowing for other possibilities to emerge, ushering in a new level of interaction and enjoyment.

The art of collecting poetry consists in the curatorial handling, that is to say with proper care and aesthetic sensibility. We’re not just throwing them all into a desktop folder in a random hodgepodge, or to be hidden in a file cabinet drawer somewhere, but rather like how a collection of flowers or a gourmet meal can be arranged for presentation, there is a great deal of care that can go into the process with poetry. All for the purpose of display, and as it turns out, that is only the beginning of the artistic deployment available to us.

As a theater artist I have created numerous performance monologues from the poetry in this collection (which is but the continuation of another very old tradition), and this book has been my primary tool for committing those poems to memory, patiently over the years, and hopefully keeping them there. Therefore, this book has helped me to create an internalized version of itself that is essentially available to me in any time or place—more or less. I started by simply photocopying poems from books, or writing them out by hand, and at first I kept them as loose pages in a good-old manila folder. Eventually I got hold of a computer, a brand-new Dell 256 mhz, and started typing my favorite stuff in a basic word-processing program. When I had enough material to form a small book I printed it and bound it by hand, and in that way it grew slowly over the years from informal to the lofty, published product you presently peruse. Now that I am in the process of putting it out there more widely, the current form serves as an example of what can be done with poems that are in the public domain, which I think is interesting in its own right by showing a fair-use version. I am also working