What’s the relationship between being able to appreciate something and being able to speak about it? Last month I saw a performance—Black Girl: Linguistic Play, by Camille A. Brown’s dance company—that interested me to the point that I wanted to think more about it. But I found that I couldn’t think more about it (except maybe in this meta sort of way: thinking about my thinking), because I’ve had such little experience with dance. I didn’t have the vocabulary to talk with myself about what I’d seen. The same thing had happened a few weeks earlier, after watching Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show. I liked both of these performances, but that’s about all I had (and still have) to offer. From someone who’s done a lot of reviewing (of books, of plays, of restaurants), that’s a pretty uninteresting take. But it did get me thinking about something I sometimes share with my poetry students.
On the first day of class, students will often express reservations about analyzing poetry. (These would be students in a literature class, not a writing workshop.) They wonder why we can’t just enjoy, rather than explicate, the poems we’ll be reading. (Explication, the argument goes, will ruin the fun.) So here’s what I say: I don’t know anything about classical music. I mean, I like classical music, and sometimes I’ll put on a Beethoven or Mozart CD when I’m trying to grade—but still, that’s all I can report: I like it. And here’s something else I like: the Barking Dogs’ version of “Jingle Bells.” And that’s perhaps a problem! Because if my critical vocabulary for discussing Mozart and discussing the Barking Dogs is exactly the same (and limited to three words), I’m not experiencing the pleasures of the former as deeply as someone who has immersed herself in that world and who understands the choices the composer and conductor have made (in the face of so many other possibilities). I might note, with pleasure, a single surprise or flourish; my imagined listener lights up at thousands.
And I think that’s the only reason to study something like poetry: so that you can enjoy it more deeply. A small example: Several of my students got excited earlier this week about a poem that appears in The Best American Poetry 2015: Erica Dawson’s “Slow-Wave Sleep with a Fairy Tale.” One thing they recognized immediately was that the poem is a sonnet—but a sonnet that sounds like it was written in the 2010s, not the 1610s. (Its opening lines: “I knocked out Sleeping Beauty, fucking cocked / her on the jaw. She fell into the briar.”) They admired Dawson’s bravura use of rhyme: her end-stopped rhymes, her enjambed rhymes. (They’ve discovered, throughout the semester, how rarely rhyme occurs in contemporary poetry.) I feel these same pleasures when reading Dawson’s work—and I also light up when reading other poems from the same anthology: Melissa Barrett’s “WFM: Allergic to Pine-Sol, Am I the Only One” (a found poem, brilliantly pieced together), Jericho Brown’s “Homeland” (with its bracing near-conclusion: “Nobody in this nation feels safe, and I’m still a reason why”), and Natalie Diaz’s “It Was the Animals” (note the cinematic turn of the “wildebeests, pigs, / the oryxes with their black matching horns” marching “into” Diaz’s brother, their tails “disappearing / like retracting vacuum cords”). These are poems, and moments in poems, that I can talk about—with my students, with myself, with readers of this blog. It’s a pleasure to do so.
Will I ever get to that point with dance? Or classical music? I’d have to attend more performances, read more deeply into the history of each art form, listen to smart people discuss, specifically, their enthusiasms. I’d probably need a point of entry. Here’s a possible one: At the end of the second Ann Arbor performance of Black Girl: Linguistic Play, Brown led a Q & A with the audience and spoke of her interest in kids’ playground games like double Dutch. “These are musically complex things they’re doing,” she said—which got me thinking about my own interest in nursery rhymes and light verse, and how those musically complex verse forms are sometimes used in poems meant to be read by adults. But that’s all I really have at the moment. Check back again in thirty years?