Comments on: Rafter of Satan

By: Todd Sullivan

Todd Sullivan — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 01:51:23 +0000

I have always been frustrated by poetry. I sometimes compare it to wine, something one must acquire a taste for. Unlike wine, however, which I now drink often, the beauty of poetry still eludes me. I had a very young, very gifted teacher my last year in undergrad at GSU, Travis Denton, who was getting his MFA in Poetry. The line about poetry I remember most from him was (paraphased) “Poets are thieves who want to be caught.” That still remains one of the more enlightening statements about poetry that I have yet heard, and I often times wish I was a better detective.
I think I mostly want to understand poetry because so many of my friends are poets, and when they ask me to critique their work, I want to feel I actually know what I am doing, and am not just giving them a prose perspective of a poem. But the poetic art form is so codified, so metaphorical, so personal, that I am often at a loss to the meaning behind most poetry I read, which serves to frustrate me poem after poem.
I will say, however, that I have read wonderful poems which, when explained to me, are truly moving.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 14:23:46 +0000

P.S. Here's a woman who explains why she thinks school puts people off literature, and adds, "Had a grown-up warned me against reading Leaves of Grass because of its scandalous sexual content I probably would have devoured it in a night under the duvet with a flashlight. Alas, at my school, it was central to the curriculum. Thus, I recall it as pretentious and was aghast at the accompanying assignment to write poetry about a mulberry tree in my garden."

By: Don Share

Don Share — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 13:58:39 +0000

I was lucky to have mentors in Derek Walcott and the late George Starbuck, but the teacher I most revere is a long-vanished prof. named Jack Erwin, who persuaded hapless, callow young folks (e.g., me) to read Pound, Eliot, Olson, and Williams (what a place to start studying literature!), warts and all, but humanely – when Prof. Erwin worked through their poems page by page, word by word, the books seemed to fall away and we could almost literally see the different worlds in them. He got us through extremely difficult works by teaching us to love difficulty. Once, when an assigned reading in translation was repeatedly unavailable at the library, I dug up the only remaining copy of our reading for the week – in the original language, which I was unable to read. When I explained to Prof. Erwin that the only copy I could locate was in German, he simply said: “It’s beautiful in the German, isn’t it?” As if I would know! The next semester I enrolled in an accelerated German reading course. Once, he wrote in the margins of a paper I’d slaved over: Sprezzatura! – having not a clue what this meant, you guessed it – on to Italian for me. When we got to Shantih shantih shantih in “The Waste Land,” he actually convinced me to take Sanskrit – but I only lasted 2 weeks in that class, taught by someone who seemed to me as old as that language; I left the only other student in the course to fend for himself. The joy John W. Erwin had for poetry so was contagious that the number of people signing up to take his courses grew and grew, but for some reason he was let go and seems never to have taught again. Every once in a while, I run into someone who took a class with him, and none of knows where he is. Thank you, wherever you are, Professor Erwin!
By coincidence, I see this morning a tribute to the legendary W.J. Bate from a former student of his on the Critical Mass blog.
Thank you for this thread, Rigoberto. I’ve owed my teachers thanks for far too long. Come forth with your great teachers!

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 08:42:39 +0000

I had a wonderful (though slightly terrifying to an eighth grader) high school English teacher, Mary Mecom. Unfortunately, she died several years ago, and I don’t think I ever really got the chance to tell her how much her classes meant to me.
“Rafter of Satan”–surely there’s a poem in that!