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Poems to Help You Get Through a Bad Day
Carolyn Marie Souaid
Good Poems for Hard Times
Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
Viking Books
344 pages
Hardcover, $36.00
When William Wordsworth broke from the poetic straitjacket of the times-- “extravagant and absurd styles” which, in his view, amounted to little more than artifice and posturing—he pioneered a foray into the formidable world of poetry. His definition of the poet as “a man speaking to men” established a more democratic, egalitarian relationship between author and reader: although the former was imbued with heightened sensibility and an ease of expression, the latter now inherited some responsibility in the literary conversation, being an informed, imaginative subject rather than a passive vessel. The result? A wee chink in the armour of impenetrability.
The notion of poetry as “accessible” commodity is one that irks a certain contingent of the ivory tower. But Garrison Keillor, a fixture on American public radio stations and the editor of Good Poems for Hard Times believes poetry is “not a puzzle that you the dutiful reader is obliged to solve.” Rather, it is meant to “poke you, get you to buck up, pay attention, rise and shine, look alive, get a grip, get the picture, pull up your socks, wake up and die right.” In an introduction well worth the price of the book, Keillor confesses that his “most intense and authentic experience of poetry” was not writing “long, heaviliy ornamented, semi-intelligible papers” for university professors, but “stealing the Oxford Anthology of Verse from Dayton’s department store in downtown Minneapolis when I was 16.” The author of sixteen books, including the popular predecessor to this volume, Good Poems, Keillor was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1994, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The bookjacket is unequivocal: “Forget what you learned about poetry in school.” The verse in these pages is not meant to be probed and dissected and handed back on a slab in the guise of a 1500-word essay, but to be a “buoy for people in ordinary trouble.” Gleaning the archives of his Writer’s Almanac radio show, Keillor has amassed some 185 poems meant to offer courage, consolation, wisdom, and inspiration to those whose everyday lives have gone “skidding into the meridian.” The resulting anthology is a rather eclectic mix of old and new.
Works by the familiar literary giants (Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, John Donne, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Thomas Hardy, John Keats, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Burns, and others) sit comfortably alongside more contemporary samplings (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Charles Bukowski, Sharon Olds, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Grace Paley, and one of Montreal’s very own – Robyn Sarah—to name a few). No highbrow elitist, Keillor has also welcomed a line-up of lesser-known poets into the fold—many of whom I didn’t recognize -- thereby making it a book that truly speaks across all tastes and generations. Despite about a dozen or so weaker pieces, Keillor has hit the mark in his selections, offering up themes as diverse as the lives we lead: childhood, aging, suicide, love, loss, divorce, unemployment, illness, parenting, death, and the list goes on.
The last thirty pages feature biographical endnotes dressed up with a personal, idiosyncratic statement by each author, such as this one by John Berryman: “Being a poet is a funny kind of jazz. It doesn’t get you anything. It doesn’t get you any money, or not much, and it doesn’t get you any prestige, or not much.” I have a hunch Keillor would disagree. Being a poet, he’d probably argue, gets you everything: inner satisfaction, a warming of the soul. Because of the probability that you’ve helped at least one guy in this chewed up world of ours. Because poetry, according to Keillor, is about arming ourselves with “high spirits and moral grandeur,” a necessary mindset for living, “lest we drift through our days consumed by clothing options and hair styling and whether to have the soup or the salad.”
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Carolyn Marie Souaid is a Montreal poet.
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Carolyn Marie Souaid. "Poems to Help You Get Through a Bad Day." Ampersand. Ed. Carolyn Marie Souaid. Montreal: Editorial Poetas de América. Apr 30, 2006.
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