Local Opinion: Approaching Poetry "on little cat feet"

Fog

By Carl Sandburg

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

I chose this line from Carl Sandburg’s poem as the title for a University of Arizona OLLI course I teach because it shows how a poem can come softly padding into your life and take you by surprise, even if you think you hate poetry. Think of how fog tends to creep in like a cat, slowly settling over a harbor or city. Our lives, whether we admit it or not, are surrounded by poetry. We breathe it like air. We live in metaphors and similes, calling our neighbor a horse’s ass or saying that a certain politician looks like an orc from Mordor. In a sense, all language is metaphorical. We use it to constantly call one thing another or compare it to that thing.

OK, so maybe you don’t actually hate poetry. Maybe you feel it’s just not your thing or that it has no relevance to your life. Or that it’s filled with “thees” and “thous” and seems written in such abstruse, highfalutin language as if it were something that needs to be decoded.

You know that lyric from a favorite song whose magical lines you keep singing over and over in the shower? Well, that’s how the earliest poems were shared. They were sung. You may be familiar with this first stanza of Dylan Thomas’s famous poem. “Do not go gentle into that good night/Old age should burn and rave at close of day/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Kind of like what rocker Neil Young sang in Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black): “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Tragically, it was also part of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s suicide note. Do you get the feeling they might have read Dylan Thomas?

Or maybe it’s a line from a speech, essay, or play that moves you to tears, but you don’t know why. Or when we say that something we read in a novel or hear someone say is pure poetry. It’s like someone speaking directly to you, pulling on all your emotional strings with words so perfect you can’t imagine them being said any other way. While you might think of this line by Hamlet as prose, it is also poetry in every sense of the word. “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” How could we ever improve upon that?

Don’t let anyone tell you what poems you should read or what they mean. That’s between you and the poet on the page. It’s what Ruth Stephan envisioned when she first founded the University of Arizona Poetry Center in 1960, where a person can “discover poetry for herself or himself by browsing alone, selecting alone, and reading alone in a quiet atmosphere.” She wanted there to be no intermediaries between you and the poet, no snotty critics or teachers to tell you what’s good or not. So forget everything you learned in English class about poems, especially that absurd question “What does the poem mean?” Who cares? The more important question is, do you like it? How does it make you feel? According to Emily Dickinson, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

We are fortunate to live in this city of art, where on almost every street corner, there’s some form of artwork, including poems to read and enjoy while you wait for the Sun Link. And a magical place like the Poetry Center — think of it, a whole building devoted solely to poetry. So go grab some poems and make your head explode!