Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets

Longfellow’s Ghost: Writing "Popular" Poetry

165 Longfellow’s Ghost: Writing “Popular” Poetry Angela Sorby Nineteenth-century poets—Lydia Sigourney, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and others—had something precious that we latter-day poets have lost. They had readers. They had thousands of readers . Ordinary people not only read poems such as “The Charge of the Light Brigade” but read them aloud and committed them to memory. By pointing this out, I do not mean to express nostalgia for the days of drugless dental work, bad roads, and compulsory schoolroom recitation. But I do wish to suggest that we can profit (though not monetarily—that’s hopeless) by thinking more carefully about questions of audience. My poem “Asphalt” was written for my grandfather’s funeral, but I want to consider it not as an elegy but as a social act, a poem aimed at a community of readers (or in this case, auditors) who are themselves neither poets nor aspiring poets. This is not a matter of moving from, say, the college poetry workshop to the slam bar; it’s rather about moving into realms (imaginatively, and sometimes literally) where people do not expect good, original, contemporary poetry at all. At best, picturing poems as social acts can help poets to understand their poems not just as forms of self-expression but as other-directed events that connect audiences to themselves and to one another. Literary theories of reception often emphasize the “dialogical” nature of meaning; that is, meaning is an unstable phenomenon produced by the author and (re-)produced by the reader. In other words, writers begin texts and readers finish them—and in finishing them, revise the meanings of texts to match their readerly expectations and wishes. But the reader is never simply an abstract ideal; reading always takes place in a specific setting that reflects specific cultural values. Poets and poetry readers are, on the one hand, happily diverse in terms of race, gender, and sexual orientation , but “we” have this in common: most of us are aligned with and/ )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 angela sorby 166 or dependent upon educational institutions. We often delude ourselves that these institutions are not really relevant to our work as poets, hence the “great divide,” most recently bemoaned by Marjorie Perloff, between literary critics and practicing poets in English departments.1 But the fact remains that most poetry reading these days takes place in colleges and universities, and this means that readers are likely to have some of the following traits: (1) they are reading the poem on the page rather than just hearing it; (2) they are willing to work to decode fairly obscure metaphors and allusions; (3) they want to “succeed” as students or teachers; and (4) they have internalized (at least for school purposes) a “high cultural,” as opposed to a “popular cultural,” aesthetic, valuing innovation over repetition , difficulty over accessibility, and ritualized dissent over consensus. I hasten to insist that none of these traits are “bad,” since, as an English professor, my own reading habits reflect them. But it’s worth pointing out, with a little help from our nineteenth-century counterparts, that there are other ways to write and read poetry. Longfellow’s poems,for example,were typically read aloud rather than silently .Asawriter,hedidnotaskhisreaderstodecodechallengingmetaphors; instead,in a poem like“TheVillage Blacksmith,”he constructs the metaphor of“the forge” and then carefully explicates its meaning for his readers: Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, For the lesson thou hast taught! Thus at the flaming forge of life Our fortunes must be wrought; Thus on its sounding anvil shaped Each burning deed and thought.2 Moreover, Longfellow did not shy away from clichés. His ideal readers were not working (as students or teachers) and didn’t necessarily want to work hard at poetry; they appreciated familiar tropes over unexpected images and ideas. And precisely because Longfellow and his ilk were so widely popular and visible, this type of rhyming, predictable verse is still what springs to mind when many people (outside of colleges and universities) think of “poetry.” In beginning undergraduate poetry workshops, there are often a few “naive” poets who write from within a nineteenth-century popular aesthetic . A typical poem by such a poet might begin: )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 longfellow’s ghost 167 On the steady road of life, We are walking, full of strife, Hardships soon will come...