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Poetry
A starting place: Mark Yakich on What is a Poem? Mark is a good friend of my father's and my first introduction to poetry (he gifted me the book Poetry Speaks which I've only appreciated over a decade later). His essay in The Atlantic is the best answer to "why do you read this stuff?" I've found (as a poetry-doubter myself). I'd argue he explains why scientists especially need poems:
A poem helps the mind play with its well-trod patterns of thought, and can even help reroute those patterns by making us see the familiar anew.
An old therapist, that looked rather like Colonel Sanders of chicken-bucket-fame, handed me his collection of "mindfulness poems" —including some Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver— which I connected to as a biologist through their rich imagery and similar infatuation of the natural world. But my appreciation of poetry comes in waves; often when my mind needs a calmness during a rough period of life (the type a therapist helps with), or, perhaps, when a global pandemic withers away at what it means to be human, or when it's clear our nation can only find its way through by turning back towards its greatest poet. So, here are some notes.
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US Poet Laureate Robert Hass on Leaves of Grass, "I think it sits right next The Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence as one of the most powerful documents of American culture [...] because it brought together so many things in the 19th Century around certain ideas of what this country was and could be... that it ought to celebrate and not be afraid of its diversity."
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"I can conceive of no better service than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy." (from Democratic Vistas)
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Charlie Rose interviews Ginsberg, Olds, and Kinnell on Whitman's poetry, on the 100th anniversary of his death. Be sure to listen to Sharon Old's reading of a passage of Song of Myself, and perhaps read some of her excellent poetry.
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Whitman Web has useful writeups of Leaves of Grass that help with interpretation.
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Langston Hughes's The Ceaseless Rings of Walt Whitman. Hughes on Whitman:
There had been a half-dozen or so slaves on the ancestral Whitman Farm, and young Walt had played with them as a child. Perhaps that is where he acquired his sympathy for the Negro People, and his early belief that all men should be free—a belief that grew to embrace the peoples of the whole world, expressed over and over throughout his poems, encompassing not only America but the colonial peoples, the serfs of tsarist Russia, the suppressed classes everywhere. His spiritual self roamed the earth wherever the winds of freedom blow however faintly, keeping company with the foiled revolutionaries of Europe or the suppressed coolies of Asia.
Because the vast sweep of democracy is still incomplete even in America today, because revolutionaries seeking to break old fetters are still foiled in Europe and Asia, because the physical life of the Brooklyn ferries and the Broadway street cars and the Mississippi river banks and the still fresh battlefields of World War II continue to pulse with the same heartbeats of humanity as in Whitman’s time, his poetry strikes us now with the same immediacy it must have awakened in its earliest readers in the 1850s.
- Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country praises Whitman's (and John Dewey's) views of how to achieve a better American society. From The Atlantic's review of Rorty's book:
The answer, Rorty says, is to emulate the model of politically engaged intellectuals of the past. The two examples he gives are the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and the poet Walt Whitman. For Rorty, the America we should be trying to achieve is a fair and classless society, one that looks for its ultimate authority not to God or a monarchy or even to some abstract notion of Nationhood, but rather to an ever-mutable democratic consensus. Developing this consensus, as both Whitman and Dewey understood, requires more than cynical commentary or rueful disengagement—it requires intellectual labor and hard political work. With effort and engagement, Rorty writes, a good society is possible, but without them, he warns, a permanently caste-ridden society—or, ultimately, even a totalitarian one—is also possible.
A physician poet, he has some incredible work. Below are some favorites:
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I, too — Hughes' reply to Walt Whitman's I Hear America Singing
My first real favorite poet, alongside Wendell Berry.
Mary on writing, in Sand Dabs, One in Blue Pastures:
Lists, and verbs, will carry you many a dry mile.
To imitate or not to imitate — the question is easily satisfied. The perils of not imitating are greater than the perils of imitating.
Always remember — the speaker doesn’t do it. The words do it.
Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
The idea must drive the words. When the words drive the idea, it’s all floss and gloss, elaboration, air bubbles, dross, pomp, frump, strumpeting.
Don’t close the poem as you opened it, unless your name is Blake and you have written a poem about a Tyger.
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Insect Life of Florida by Lynda Hull.
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First Light Edging Cirrus by Jane Hirshfield (shared by my friend Mary)
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Galway Kinnell's Saint Francis and the Sow. Here is a young Galway reading this poem. (shared by my friend Mary).
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Booker T. and W.E.B. by Dudley Randall. Du Bois's debate with Stoddard shows another angle of the Booker T. vs W.E.B. disagreement; Stoddard, a eugenicist and white supremacist used Booker T's arguments against Du Bois on stage. The debate ended with Stoddard being humiliated by Du Bois. I must say though, as much as I like early Du Bois (before him being a Mao and USSR sympathizer), in some of his writing (quote contained within) he reads worryingly like a eugenicist himself.