It's the Poetry's Fault

What several lifetimes of reading poetry has done.

by Carolyn Clare Givens

When my great grandparents, Lewis and Lorena, married in 1903, Lewis worked for Dodd, Mead & Co., a publisher known for the quality of its publications. Lewis worked as a sales representative for the company out of Kansas City, and traveled widely for his work, regularly bringing home books as gifts after his trips.

Dodd, Mead & Co. was known for publishing the work of new poets, including Robert Service and Paul Laurence Dunbar. On my poetry shelves are copies of three of Dunbar’s collections, one of which is inscribed, “Compliments of Dodd, Mead and Company, Christmas 1903.” The beautiful books show wear—these were not just set up on shelves and forgotten. This poetry was read.

The inscription on When Malindy Sings by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Lewis and Lorena raised their daughters to love poetry, too. Many of the books on my poetry shelves—from the Oxford Book of English Verse, to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, to the selected verse of Kipling—bear my grandmother and her sisters’ names. One, The Chief American Poets, was claimed by each at some point in its existence, for all three names are listed.

Then there’s the copy of Tales of a Wayside Inn by Longfellow, which was purchased on September 23, 1926 at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in South Sudbury, Massachusetts, for my great aunt Doris by her father. How do I know that? The handwritten note on the fore leaf: “As your favorite poems are those of Mr. Longfellow, I want to add to your pleasure in them by presenting to you this ‘Visitor’s Edition’…secured in my visit to the Inn.” He goes on to tell her about the room he stayed in, and the famed tenor who had used the same room before signing off, “Lovingly, Daddy.”

Lewis’ inscription on Tales of a Wayside Inn. Also, check out the book plate.

Doris was 19 when she received this gift from her father. You’re never too old for your daddy to give you poetry.

To say that reading poetry is in my blood would be an understatement. To the collection of titles I inherited from my grandmother and my great aunts, I added my own over the years: Shel Silverstein, Robert Frost, Tennyson, Dante, Barrett Browning, Eliot, Shakespeare, Millay.

Lorena and Lewis with some of the poetry they shared with their daughters—and some I’ve added to the stack.

When I was homeschooled in fourth grade, my mom added poetry memorization into my curriculum. Alongside Psalm 51 and 100, I memorized poems like “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “The Road Not Taken.” Then in middle school and high school I added to my mental collection with poems and segments of poems that struck my fancy: Tennyson’s “In Memoriam VII,” Hamlet’s soliloquy, John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” Langston Hughes’ “I, Too.” These melancholy verses live cheek-by-jowl in my brain next to Shel Silverstein’s “4^th of July” and A. A. Milne’s “When I Was One.”

As an adult, these poems stored away in my mind come out at odd moments, like when I recited “I’m Being Eaten by a Boa Constrictor” upon hearing my friend’s son had held one over the weekend. But they also enrich with beauty otherwise everyday things. I often hear a segment from Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur” in my mind,

Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran,
And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged
Among the bulrush-beds, and clutch'd the sword,
And strongly wheel'd and threw it. The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch,
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock
By night, with noises of the northern sea.
So flash'd and fell the brand Excalibur:
But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
And caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him
Three times, and drew him under in the mere.

This small scene of Bedivere returning Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake, finally fulfilling his King, Arthur’s, dying wish, rattles around my inner ear, giving me a sense of rhythm, alliteration, and onomatopoeia.

Maybe my great grandparents are the reason I’m a writer. Or maybe it’s their daughters. Or their daughter’s daughter. Whoever it is—poetry was involved.

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“If I had a cat, I’d name it ‘Poetry.’ Because cats are poetry. . . They’re small and hard to understand, and they give you warm fuzzy feelings, but sometimes they prick you and it hurts.”
Zizi Harper, in The Balter of Ashton Harper by Millie Florence