A New Conversation

I really enjoyed our last class and discussion about the various artists who use poetry as a way to engage in conversation with writers they never had the chance to meet. I especially enjoyed talking about the poet who used Shakespeare’s sonnets to display hidden messages. The way, for example, that this particular poet chose to use Shakespeare’s words to argue against war struck me as incredibly fascinating. As I mentioned in class, it seemed to me that the author was trying to say that, had Shakespeare been around, he would have agreed with her convictions; that, when looked at closely, his work wholeheartedly supported her arguments. In short, she found a way to engage in dialogue with Shakespeare, to gain his approval without having to be in the same room with him – and how cool is that?

I cannot count the number of times I’ve read a poem by one of my favorite authors and wished that I could have talked with them about issues concerning social justice, equality, and humanity in general. Actually, there have been quite a few times I would have settled for discussing something as trivial as hazelnut flavored coffee with an individual such as Henry David Thoreau or Walt Whitman. Yes, that’s right, it would have been enough just to hear one of the before mentioned individuals share with me the specifics of their own favorite caffeinated beverage. The longing to know these artists a little bit more as people than mere historical figures, to me, has some similarities to the legendary wish of humans to ask God a question, actually expecting a verbal reply. This, I think, is the precise reason people go out of their way to get back staged passes to concerts, go to conferences, and travel long distances for literary readings. What other explanation could there be?

It’s entirely unlikely that one will end up in the same room with her favorite living artist, let alone an artist who’s already long gone, and was in fact writing during a generation far removed from her own. I couldn’t help but feel a little sad while reading Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl and Other Poems.” The author spoke so passionately about the problems facing his generation as well as its attributes that I found myself wanting to know how he would feel about the circumstances encompassing my own generation. I would like nothing better than to be able to ask him this, to be able to prove true my gut feeling that the two of us would have absolutely gotten along. I also can’t help but feel this is typical – at least for poetic dorks like me.

Ginsberg, after all, felt this way about Walt Whitman. His poem, “A Supermarket in California,” includes several references to Whitman, and goes so far as to place him in a contemporary supermarket in California. Also, as I mentioned in my review, Ginsberg adopted Whitman’s tendency to use anaphora in his work. In this way, he found a way to connect with Whitman through writing. Apparently methods like these are common and reap benefits I’ve, up until now, been missing. That being said, I think I’m going to start practicing them ASAP. I think it would be really fun to take words from another poem like we did in class and play around with them to form alternative meanings; maybe I’ll learn something I didn’t know before. If it’s the closes I can get to real conversation with my literary heroes, I’ll definitely take it.