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'Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry' by Kenneth Koch

A friendly exploration of poetry and an elitist one

Sunday, April 11, 1999

By Jan Beatty

	Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry By Kenneth Koch Scribner $27.50

Kenneth Koch, the author of 19 collections of poetry, has truly offered a welcoming, accessible path to the pleasures of the art in his latest book.

He breathes so much personality into these pages by acknowledging the fears and misgivings that many people bring to poetry:

“Poetry…has often been written about in ways that make it seem more difficult, more mysterious, more specialized, and more remote than it actually is — it is written about as a mystery, as a sort of intellectual/aesthetic code that has to be broken…”

All I can say is, “Amen.” It’s rare to find an intellectual who doesn’t need to cloak his intellect in elitist language.

Koch takes us on a slow, full-bodied journey through poetry land by speaking of poetry as a “language within a language,” then leading us through interesting discussions of meter, line and other poetic devices.

Years ago I taught a course at the University of Pittsburgh’s Informal Program called “Fear of Poetry.” People signed up. People were afraid.

Muriel Rukeyser, in her landmark 1949 book, “The Life of Poetry,” dedicates 51 pages to the fear of poetry. What is this fear all about?

She says, “A poem does invite, it does require. What does it invite? A poem invites you to feel.” There it is.

Koch goes a long way toward disarming this fear through his clear explanations and his conversational style. The second half of Koch’s book offers an anthology of 165 pages of poems from Homer to Frank O’Hara, along with an engaging commentary on each poem.

There’s a problem, though — we are graced with the work of 75 poets, only 13 of which are women. And of those women, we see the work of Queen Elizabeth and Bessie Smith. These women would be fine choices if they were in the company of many, many more women. Writers of color are likewise underrepresented.

Which brings me to Robert Pinsky’s “The Sounds of Poetry.” The current poet laureate of the United States is the author of three prose collections and five books of poetry. The latest, “The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996,” won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, adding to his formidable collection.

In his new book, Pinsky cautions us in the introduction that “This is a brief guide: my goal is not an all-inclusive map but a brief, plain, accurate presentation of the most important points.”

Pinsky’s style could not be further from Koch’s. While Koch invites his readers in to participate in a storyteller-reader relationship, Pinsky gives his readers a skeletal guide.

He frames the book in a provocative way, by invoking the body as metaphor: “The theory of this guide is that poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art. The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.”

Sounds promising, doesn’t it?

Although Pinsky has some flashes of inspired language and lively passages when he discusses sound and free verse, he doesn’t follow through on this body metaphor.

He also uses a dry, lecturing voice that instructs by giving information. At its worst, this voice is elitist, almost scolding.

When talking about accent and duration, Pinsky writes:

“The expert makes the moves without needing to think about them. But the more we notice and study, the more we can get from actual performance. And analysis of a fluid performance into its parts can lead to understanding, and perhaps eventually to the expert’s level of insight and the expert’s kind of joy.”

Certainly Pinsky has earned his right to speak as an “expert.” What is embedded, though, in the need to label it that? Maybe I’m missing something, but I didn’t know there was a kind of joy reserved for the “expert.”

Koch sets a strong example for Pinsky in terms of how to invite the reader in to the world of poetry. It’s a matter of positioning, and interrogating the “language of the ‘expert.’ ”

A final note: Both authors used the unending well of white male writers as their world view.

I’m not interested in political correctness, just what’s real. How many more poetry books do I have to read that act as if women writers and writers of color never existed?

Jan Beatty is a Pittsburgh native whose latest poetry collection, “Mad River,” is published by University of Pittsburgh Press.