The poetic art

There's always a gap, always a space, always an opening for us, for the reader. There has to be: art suggests; it doesn't preach. Even if the poet wants to change the world, flat straightforwardness is the enemy. "Tell all the truth," Dickinson so famously wrote, "but tell it at a slant." Art requires very little really, but if a poem is to be artful it has to leave openings for reader-participants because we're part of it. 

Case in point, “Clear and Sunny,” a little poem by my friend, Dave Schelhaas, in a new collection of poetry titled Final Exam: Poems About Teaching, collected and edited by J. Barry Koops, a treasure, by the way, for an ex-teacher.

I heard it again this morning
the music of the playground.

Because I know the writer, who lives a hop, step, and a jump from a school playground, I'm two lines into the poem, and I see him. If "writing is seeing," then he's got me already because I can see him and I can hear "the music of the playground" from his own front walk.

Worried that I would not hear it,
I had listened as soon as I left the house,
and there it was,
softened by all the green leaves in the tall trees,
rich like thick jam on buttered bread,
more beautiful than church bells:
the shouts and laughter of schoolchildren.

"Green leaves," "thick jam," "church bells"--all embellishment. He's scoring "the music of the playground," or recording it for us to hear. He's playing the music, or singing it, so the notes rise mellifluously from the printed page. Great music. Kids.

But the line, "Worried that I would not hear it,/I had listened as soon as I left the house" introduces some conflict, some darkness, the heft of his worry that's satisfied in a moment by "the shouts and laughter of school children."

I'm in. I know the poet. I'm quite sure I know his sadness, his worry--I know the darkness he knows. I get it.

The last three lines nail it, describing the outpouring of his relief at hearing all that music a half a block away--

bubbling through air waves still trembling
with the terrible news of
yesterday.

Whatever happened "yesterday" is the horror, the darkness, an enemy. And because I know the poet, without a bit of doubt I tell myself I know the darkness. The poem was written in the last couple of years when that very school suffered horrific trauma when one of its teachers was sexually abusing his students. 

Here's how this reader's mind put the story together: Dave walked out his back door one fair morning, filled with the darkness generated by what had happened at the school down the block, the school his grandchildren attend. Then, unmistakably, he heard, "the music of the playground," and in it the sheer beauty of innocence drawing back the veil of tears, kids having fun.

I thought I had it down, this poem written by a friend.

But then--and only then--I spotted the subtitle: "September 12" and realized "Clear and Sunny" wasn't a poem about the monster of sexual abuse, but the horror of Twin Towers buckling into a cloud of poison dust by kamikaze assassins.  

I'd been thinking that, because I know the poet, the heart of the poem was obvious. I was wrong. It's not about the school, it's about 9/11, and the relief those children's playground voices sang the morning after, on September 12. 

Now let's just say the poem didn't use the subtitle, deleted it in a final edit before he finished. If you read the poem without its datedness (or my personal associations), then the poem is both less specifically constructed (taking some solace in life after 9/11) and more universal in its reach (about how we take solace--period--in the darkness all around us). 

Because I know the poet, I was ready almost instantaneously to fill that open space I'm offered as a reader. The poem made immediate sense. Then I saw the subtitle, and realized I was wrong--way wrong.  

But the gap, the space, the blank the reader has to fill, would have been even wider, its impact more well, global, because less immediate. The poem would be more "universal," to grab a literary weapon from the arsenal, had the poet not specifically dated the poem via its subtitle. 

Would it be a better poem? Depends on who you ask. There's no accounting for taste. It would be less specific and more vague. Merit might be an interesting topic for English majors--should the poet have deleted the subtitle? Talk among yourselves.

Everything I've just written, however, in the long post about a short poem attests to the joy, the human joy, of poetry and art itself. Even though writing "September 11: Clear and Sunny" didn't earn my friend a dime, I'm sure he wasn't looking to be salaried. He just wanted us all to hear the music rising from the playground on a morning he couldn't help but feel that grief and anger left the world without any harmony.

That's the music he heard and the song he wanted to sing for us and with us.