Poetry, dinosaurs and imagination
It seems somehow fitting that the month T. S. Eliot named the “cruelest” would also be named National Poetry Month, given how complicated our relationship with poetry is. Emerson went on and on about how we all think we hate poetry, but we are secretly poets. He then did poets no favors when he proclaimed poets to be “liberating gods.”
Writing good poetry is difficult, but poets labor under a Rodney Dangerfield curse of writing without respect. Many years ago as an undergraduate, someone sneered at me, “What are you going to be — a poet?” upon discovering that I was an English major. It’s bad enough having people use “poet” as the ultimate pejorative, but then getting burdened with the “liberating god” label — it’s no wonder we’ve given cruel April, with its bright and empty promises of distant spring, to the poets.
I probably have more poets as friends than the average citizen, which is not surprising for someone who teaches English, and my signed book collection includes books by Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlighetti. I have also written poetry for as long as I can remember. Back in 1976 I sent my first poems to Highlights magazine, and honesty demands that I admit to receiving in return my first rejection letter, which I still have tucked away in an old shoebox.
As a part of the poetic celebrations for the month, my wife and I attended a poetry reading at Byrd’s Books in Bethel, where we enjoyed hearing many local poets, including two very good friends. It might be saying too much to claim that any of the readers we heard that night were liberating gods, but all of them invited their readers to bask in language and to catch a glimpse of the possibilities that imagination can unlock.
After taking time off from writing poetry in order to finish a dissertation, write the articles necessary to get a job and tenure, and then write a book to get a promotion, I’ve returned to poetry. Many of my new works center on my son as a subject, and his restlessly imaginative spirit serves as an inspiration.
His imagination has lately been directed mainly at dinosaurs, and I am sure many parents will understand when I say that I never knew that “micropachycephalosaurus” would become such an important word in my vocabulary. My son was part of a team that represented Bethel in the state Odyssey of the Mind competition, and they chose, naturally, a dinosaur theme for their project.
All of the kids on the team worked incredibly hard and called on insane reserves of energy to come up with some fun and amazing displays. As they worked, the other parents and I talked about how imaginative the kids were, and we worried about how undervalued imagination seems to be. When we attended the competition in New Haven, I heard that concern echoed again and again in a dramatic contrast to the overwhelming evidence of imagination on display in the kids’ projects.
The big Odyssey rule is that the kids have to solve problems for themselves, without parental input. When the other parents and I watched the kids work through the problems that arose in the course of their project, we all felt a bit humbled. We had our own solutions, but the kids had their own weird, unorthodox, but completely workable ideas.
The kids’ solutions were poetry. Not in the rhyming couplet sense, but in the way their imaginations were unburdened by the things that make adults boring and uncreative. Their thoughts were free to fly, and, watching them, I knew what Emerson meant about liberating gods.