A few years ago I read a Facebook post from Humans of New York, a photography project that shows ordinary New Yorkers, and contains a quote from a brief interview with the person. Usually they ask who they are, and what they do, or are doing—and perhaps one follow-up question. In one particular post, they spoke to a woman who was a Ph.D. student at NYU in English Literature, studying poetry. They asked her, “What makes a good poem?” Her response was, “A good poem is one that changes you into a different person after you’ve read it.”
That sounds like a tall order for most poets. Yet, there’s a truth to it; like good music, good poetry should be felt in the soul, it should vibrate on your frequency, shake you up, pick you up, and drop you somewhere else. While I appreciate a lot of poetry that is labeled as “good” (and you can argue further about what that means), there are some poems that have changed my life.
Let’s start with Sylvia Plath’s poem The Moon and the Yew Tree. Literary critic A. Alvarez described this poem as pivotal in Plath’s career, as it represents a sudden and dramatic change of voice. She starts with very traditional sounding lines, and cadences, “Fumy spiritous mists inhabit this place, separated from my house by a row of headstones.” Then, suddenly: “I cannot see where there is to get to.” I didn’t have to be a literary critic to feel the change. You feel a woman who has repressed who she really is, to follow form and decorum—and suddenly it breaks down. The fact that she covered disturbing material in her past (like The Disquieting Muses) isn’t the point. You hear a sudden change of voice that is sustained through the entire volume of Ariel, her last work of poetry before her death. You see a mask coming off, the poet following traditional forms now starting to unravel, to show you the internal explosion, where she says “The moon is my mother / She is not sweet like Mary / Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.” She is engulfed by the dark, because she has never successfully grappled with it, in spite of the pleadings of Lady Lazarus. You can sense the Dark Mother taking over, and you can feel the shift, as if a false front has dropped and fallen away.
For a different kind of epiphany, I look to Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop has many brilliant poems, but The Moose is the first of her works to really shake me to my core. It’s a rather long poem in her collection entitled Geography III, a work I read as an undergraduate. It is about leaving Nova Scotia for Boston, on a journey to a new and uncertain life. The moose of the title appears toward the end, as a kind of vision of raw feminine protection. When I heard the poem read aloud, the appearance of the moose struck a sudden chord inside, and I could feel myself get choked up. It was a moment in the midst of chaos that you could feel an unspeakable and mysterious joy. And it’s hard to say why, from a technical standpoint; it just happened. And I was not the same person after hearing it. I had a similar shock to my system after hearing her poem The Waiting Room, and her melancholy villanelle, One Art. Somehow she manages to reach something primal in our emotions, something archetypal, and the soft expression of it amplifies the effect. Like a mystical experience, it’s almost impossible to describe; it just has to be experienced.
Maybe the common denominator is the liminal; these are moments of transition, in which the poet moves from one state to another. Plath is removing a facade, Bishop is expressing the emotional subtext of profound moments of change. My friends who are also Literature grads are surprised when I say the same thing about Tennyson’s In Memoriam. In the long soliloquy to his dead friend, Arthur Hallum, we see Tennyson’s grief shift from its sorrow to the realization that life goes on, and the acceptance of the loss: He is not here ; but far away ; The noise of life begins again / And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain / On the bald street breaks the blank day.” While not as jolting as the Plath poem, there is a definite shift in voice and attitude in the narrator after this point.
So, “becoming a different person” after reading a really good poem may have a truth to it. The poet becomes the magical voice of the liminal; like the goete, they sing a kind of death song that puts the dead to rest and allows life to go on, and a new situation to take its place. Though, perhaps after all this is just my experience; poetry reading friends, what is yours?