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 an enemy. "Tell all the truth," Dickinson so famously wrote, "but tell it at a slant." Art may require very little of us, but if a poem is to be artful it leaves openings for reader-participants because we are a part of it.
Case in point, “Clear and Sunny,” a little poem by my friend, Dave Schelhaas, who occasionally appears in these pages. “Clear and Sunny” is in a collection of poetry titled Final Exam: Poems About Teaching, collected and edited by J. Barry Koops. It’s a treasure, by the way, for an ex-teacher, or for many who find themselves, this week, once again up front in a classroom.
The first two lines go like this:
I heard it again this morning
the music of the playground.
Look, I know the writer. I know he lives a hop, step, and jump from a school playground, busy today, I’m sure. I'm two lines into the poem, and I see him walking along on a sidewalk just up the street. If "writing is seeing," then Schelhaas has me already because I see him and I hear "the music of the playground." I'm in.
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"--it's all embellishment. He's scoring "the music of the playground," playing a blessed recording meant for us. The notes rise mellifluously from the printed page. Great music. Just kids, little ones. No one’s singing, but what rises from the swings is great music.
Then, conflict: "Worried that I would not hear it,/I had listened as soon as I left the house.” Some darkness rises, but the heft of the poet's worry is relieved in a moment by "the shouts and laughter of school children."
I'm in this all right. I know the poet. I'm thinking I know the nature of the troubling sadness too, even his worry. I know the darkness he knows. I get it. I live here too.
The last three lines nail it--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.
What happened "yesterday" is the horror, the darkness, an enemy. And because I know the poet, I tell myself I know the darkness. The poem was written in the last couple of years when the school down the block suffered horrific trauma when one of its teachers was abusing his students.
David 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. He heard the splendid oratorio of kids having fun.
Sure, 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 horrors of sexual abuse, but the day the Twin Towers buckled into a cloud of poison dust at the hands of 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 the madness in Manhattan.
Now let's just say the poem didn't use the subtitle, deleted it in a final edit before he finished. If read without its datedness or my personal associations, the poem is both less specifically constructed (taking some solace in life after 9/11) and more universal (how hearing children is solace in the darkness all around).
I was ready in a moment to fill that open space I'm offered as a reader. The poem made immediate sense, until I saw the subtitle and realized I was wrong--way, 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 might be more "universal," to grab a literary weapon from the arsenal, had the poet not specifically dated it via its subtitle.
But would it be a better poem? It would be less specific and more vague. “Merit” might be an interesting topic for English majors--should the poet have dumped 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 his writing the poem didn't earn my friend a dime, 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 had left the world without any harmony at all.
That's the music he heard and the song he wanted to sing for us and with us.
I heard it again this morning
the music of the playground.
Look, I know the writer. I know he lives a hop, step, and jump from a school playground, busy today, I’m sure. I'm two lines into the poem, and I see him walking along on a sidewalk just up the street. If "writing is seeing," then Schelhaas has me already because I see him and I hear "the music of the playground." I'm in.
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"--it's all embellishment. He's scoring "the music of the playground," playing a blessed recording meant for us. The notes rise mellifluously from the printed page. Great music. Just kids, little ones. No one’s singing, but what rises from the swings is great music.
Then, conflict: "Worried that I would not hear it,/I had listened as soon as I left the house.” Some darkness rises, but the heft of the poet's worry is relieved in a moment by "the shouts and laughter of school children."
I'm in this all right. I know the poet. I'm thinking I know the nature of the troubling sadness too, even his worry. I know the darkness he knows. I get it. I live here too.
The last three lines nail it--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.
What happened "yesterday" is the horror, the darkness, an enemy. And because I know the poet, I tell myself I know the darkness. The poem was written in the last couple of years when the school down the block suffered horrific trauma when one of its teachers was abusing his students.
David 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. He heard the splendid oratorio of kids having fun.
Sure, 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 horrors of sexual abuse, but the day the Twin Towers buckled into a cloud of poison dust at the hands of 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 the madness in Manhattan.
Now let's just say the poem didn't use the subtitle, deleted it in a final edit before he finished. If read without its datedness or my personal associations, the poem is both less specifically constructed (taking some solace in life after 9/11) and more universal (how hearing children is solace in the darkness all around).
I was ready in a moment to fill that open space I'm offered as a reader. The poem made immediate sense, until I saw the subtitle and realized I was wrong--way, 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 might be more "universal," to grab a literary weapon from the arsenal, had the poet not specifically dated it via its subtitle.
But would it be a better poem? It would be less specific and more vague. “Merit” might be an interesting topic for English majors--should the poet have dumped 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 his writing the poem didn't earn my friend a dime, 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 had left the world without any harmony at all.
That's the music he heard and the song he wanted to sing for us and with us.
Hear it?
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