Poetic Digression

On Sunday, I visited a couple of bookstores and among a few other things, I picked up a copy of Pablo Neruda's The Hands of Day.

Pablo Neruda is by far one of my favorite poets. His style is very observational, and he writes about conventional sorts of things. I almost feel as though I'm sitting next to him as he points to specific objects, talking to me about them. First, he points to the broom he doesn't know how to make in the first poem of the book, entitled ``The Guilty One''.

"Why did I not make a broom?
Why was I given hands at all?''

He talks then about the broom with a sort of sensual admiration. He talks about `the golden bundle' and `the yellow skirt' of the broom itself, and uses words like `uniting' and `gathering' to describe the act of making it. When I read his poems, I not only see a handmade broom - dusty, bent, and well-used - sitting in a slightly darkened corner, but I feel the stalks of un-united grass in my hands. First they're pliant and smell alive, and then they're dry and stiff after they've been prepared in the hot sun.

There was another poem that grabbed me for a slightly different reason: ``Cycle''. Beginning with the line-->
"It repeats itself once, the humid springtime"
and ending with-->
"On the stem a rose?
I set it ablaze."

The whole poem is about waking, about the force of spring and the new blossoms pushing upwards. Immediately I started hearing Tom Waits' ``You Can Never Hold Back Spring'' in my head.
"You can never hold back spring,
You can be sure I will never stop believing,
The blushing rose that will climb,
Spring ahead or fall behind,
Winter dreams the same dream every time..."
It's on the Bawler's CD (#2) of the 3 CD set Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards. It's one of Waits' gentler songs, that sounds like a soft reminder not to try and hold things that are impermanent, because "remember everything that spring can bring...Oh, you can never hold back spring...''

And then I thought...anyone who thinks that lyrics can't be poems and vice versa can kiss my proverbial buttocks. Now, I'd put very few lyricists into the category of poets, but I can think of a couple without working too hard - Paul Simon, Tom Waits, and Neil Young for example. I've also heard some great renditions of old poems as songs. Loreena McKennitt did a great version of William Butler Yeats' "The Two Trees" as an accompanied solo voice, and it made a deep impression on me. On another album, she set Shakespeare's closing lines of "The Tempest" to music.

Anyway, a bit of a digression from my usual fare. I don't spend a lot of time reading poetry, as much as I like it. As it says in Proverbs ``A well-spoken word is like an apple of gold''. One of my labmates at work gave me that reference, by the way.