Whether Novice or Devotee...
Two experiences worth your time
All effective writers try to know their audience, and that’s certainly true for Substack creators, even those like myself who give away their content for free, and whose sole hope is that you’ll read a piece with some expectation that you’ll learn about something of interest to you in the world of arts and culture. Roughly half my readers are ardent lovers of poetry, and subscribe for that reason. The other half are friends and family, who like to stay current with what I’m reading/watching/listening to, but don’t count poetry among their interests. My hope is that my two suggestions today will appeal to both my audiences. The quality of the engagement with poetry in both suggestions is high, and the content will give outsiders to the world of poetry a vivid sense as to poetry’s unique appeal. To all of you, then: Dive in, the water’s fine.
I’ve been aware of Lloyd Schwartz for most of my adult life, early on because he was the classical music critic at the Boston Phoenix, an alternative weekly that I still miss, more recently as poet, author, educator, and enthusiastic proponent of all things poetical. Recently, he appeared on the Boston Globe editorial page with a provocatively titled article, “Is Poetry Useless?” In that article, he called attention to a series of monthly Zoom meetups he’s hosted for two different local libraries, “Let’s Talk About a Poem.”
Because most Zoom sessions happen when they happen and then disappear, I had no reason to expect to find prior sessions on-line, but jump on YouTube, and there they are. I decided to try one or two. Despite the fact that the audio and video quality are about what you would expect from Zoom, the deeply rich close reading that Schwartz and his excellent group of attendees engage in is first-rate.
The one I’m recommending for you today happened just last month, when the group had the rare privilege of reading Frank Bidart’s “Half-Light” with Bidart himself participating. Some of you may recall when I attended (age 85) Robert Pinsky’s Boston Book Festival reading that I took some pleasure in imbibing the energy of someone a decade and a half my senior. Well, Schwartz is 83 and Bidart is 85, so there’s that. Bidart starts the session by reading the poem. My suggestion is that you read it first, decide what you think of it, print it out, and have it on hand as you view the video. I’ll put two links to the poem here, since you never can tell whether they will remain accessible, one from the New Yorker, one from Poetry Daily. The poem is in eighteen couplets, and the Schwartz/Bidart close reading explores all of them. At a micro level, the discussions about word choice, verb tense, and punctuation get to the bottom of how poetry works its magic. At a macro level, you’ll learn about how Bidart uses his own life experience to communicate universal ideas about love and death. The video is over 80 minutes long and the poem merits that level of attention:
By the way, “Half-Light” is included in a recent book currently on loan to me from the library, A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925-2025. I’ll withhold commentary on the book for a future post, but I suspect the existence of such a collection will appeal to many of you.
My second suggestion will take even more of your time than the hour and a half I hope you spend on Bidart, but if you want a high-quality college-level introduction to the work of a single poet, you couldn’t do much better than this: Recently, I found in a Little Free Library a book by my favorite writer on poetry, Helen Vendler, on a poet I knew by reputation only (except for reading his Beowulf translation a few years back). Irish Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney. Then, only a few weeks later, I came upon Heaney’s collected poems Opened Ground: 1966-1996 at my local library’s used book sale. What’s marvelous about this pairing is that Vendler published her book at the same time Heaney issued his collection, meaning that Vendler is commenting on the same set of poems.
I chose to read the two books in tandem. Vendler considers the poems chronologically, which suits my approach. Sometimes, I would read a few Heaney poems before seeing what Vendler has to say; at other times, I would let Vendler enlighten me first and then read the corresponding poems in Opened Ground. Heaney’s output evolved in ways that Vendler is gifted at making clear. By the time you’ve finished both books, you are likely to want to begin re-reading Heaney post haste.
