My summer obsession . . .

Summertime—glorious summertime—has ushered in a new interest for me.

Cousin time at a Padre game!

Of course, the San Diego Padres!

But also another, different kind of obsession:

Poetry.

The great poetess, Mary Oliver once said, poetry gets at that “wild, silky part of ourselves.”

I’m beginning to agree.

For me, it all began with an article in The New York Times on Frank O’Hara and one of his best-known poems, “Having a Coke with You,” (How on earth can you resist poetry with a title like that?) a classic musing which captures the thrill of romantic infatuation and that wonder of being so enraptured with someone that spending time in their company is better than anything else your imagination can conjure up.

O’Hara writes that “Having a Coke with You” is “even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irus, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Traversera de Gracia in Barcelona…”

By praising the beauty and authenticity of everyday moments, "Having a Coke with You" challenges the notion that art must be monumental or grand to be meaningful. Instead, it asserts the value of the ordinary and the subjective experience.

Hard not to like Frank O’Hara, known as ‘a poet among the painters” because of his association with the riotous band of New York abstract expressionist painters, his affiliation with MoMA in Manhattan, and his livewire, party animal lifestyle.

And his simple verse and conversational tone which has captivated a non-poetry person like me.

My deep dive into poetry continued with my two-person book club’s first selection of the summer, Your Brain on Art, by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, an academic, scientific New York Times bestseller which convincingly makes the case that art, especially art in community, is transformative beyond measure.

However, the book is a non-fiction struggle and we opted to do it in small doses.

Reading (no matter how slowly) this book has further validated my new interest in poetry:

“Our brains are hardwired for the rhythms and thymes of poetry, lighting up the right side of the brain, while a poem that truly resonates with us does so at a neurological level by stimulating the areas of the brain that are associated with meaning-making and the interpretation of reality.”

I experienced several extremely sorrowful, difficult-to-process events recently and floundered as I contemplated how people could endure crisis while others went about their business. This happens regularly; it is a reality I understood.

At one point in Your Brain on Art the celebrated British-born bard, W. H. Auden poet is highlighted.

I knew a bit about Auden’s work and had written about his poetry during one of the many sad times of the pandemic in my last book, After Goya—A Mature-ish Fairy Tale:

“W. H. Auden’s poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” came to mind, perhaps because my daughter-in-law had first introduced me to his poetry. I read this particular poem from the book she loaned me when my docent training class studied Renaissance Old Masters at the San Diego Museum of Art at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Twenty-plus years ago. To me, the poem demonstrated what had become a strong belief of mine—that art had the power to illuminate universal, enduring truths that sometimes go unacknowledged.

'About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just

walking dully along'

Since that moment, Auden’s elegiac message highlighting the strange, contrasting human experiences that are part of the fabric of life—one person suffers terribly, another carries on regardless with some ordinary activity—has stayed with me and at times inspired my writing, my work as an art educator, and hopefully my everyday life.

Somehow the poet’s message had escaped me in yesterday’s frenzy and frolic . . .”

Magsamen and Ross, the brilliant authors of Your Brain on Art, introduced me to the most powerful poem I’ve ever read saying “Poetry also offers a safe way to engage with difficult emotions . . .why are we able to read W. H. Auden when he writes “stop all the clocks” in his sorrowful elegy to a beloved friend and we might even turn to it when we are in mourning ourselves?”

Still reeling with despair over my recent sad news, I put the book down to search for Auden’s masterful and most memorable poem, “Funeral blues.”

When I found it, there was a familiarity about it, but I didn’t know why until I googled more.

In one particularly moving scene from 1994’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, Matthew, a character portrayed by John Hannah, eulogized his companion by reading “Funeral Blues.”

Many of us who had probably never read Auden’s work—or poetry for that matter—remember the scene. poem, often called the "stop the clocks" poem begins like this:

"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come" . . ."

One last insight from the book about the effects of poetry:

“We are able to sit with sorrowful emotions in this way because poems are particularly effective in inducing intense involvement, sustaining focused attention and granting high memorability. And importantly all these effects occur against a background of personal safety of the perceiver.”

Auden, a messy genius of a poet, crafted verse of exquisite order in down-to-earth words easily understood even by a neophyte like me, a work I will always remember.  I have shared the “stop the clock” poem with a handful of close friends who, like me, have found tears in their eyes and lumps in their throats.

This is why I’m obsessed with poetry this summer!

Wild and silky stuff.

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Here’s an excerpt from one more highlighted in Your Brain on Art -

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver:

“. . .Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”