Volume 24 227
Not only has the mainstream begun to open its
doors to a widening range of marginalized poets,
but the last two decades have seen an unprece-
dented burst of poetry activities, from White House
celebrations hosted by the President and First Lady
to the formation of a national poetry month; from
billboards in Los Angeles filled with poems by con-
temporary poets to the inclusion of a poetry book
as a standard feature with all new Volkswagens
shipped in April; from cross-country book give-
aways inspired by Joseph Brodsky’s claim that po-
etry should be as available as the Gideon Bible to
the distribution by tollbooth operators in New Jer-
sey of free copies of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”
Added to that we’ve seen a huge proliferation of
poetry awards, web sites, spoken arts recordings,
open mike nights, and public radio and television
specials. All this couldn’t have happened without
the interest and enthusiasm of the common reader.
What advice would you offer to the young
poet? What would you have him do or read for his
poetic education?
Oh, I don’t know. Read everything, avoid
thinking you’re a genius, don’t settle too early on
for what kind of poetry you want to write, and be
willing and able to give up everything for the work
without expecting anything whatsoever in return.
Source:James Rother, “Sherod Santos: The Refining In-
strument of Poetry (An Interview),” in http://www.cprw
.com/members/Rother/santos.htm, 2001, pp. 1–5.
Floyd Collins
In the following essay excerpt, Collins de-
scribes the attributes of lyric poetry and places
Santos’s works, including “Portrait of a Couple at
Century’s End,” within a framework of transience
and elegy.
I
Thanks to court intrigue and the vacillation of
Mary Tudor, half-sister to the late Edward VI, the
English crown adorned the head of seventeen-year-
old Lady Jane Grey for nine days in 1563. Even-
tually she was led to the executioner’s block to have
that head lopped off. When the Tower warden ran-
sacked her cell later, he found a sheet of parchment
riddled with pinpricks. When held to the light, the
tiny perforations formed verses she had composed
shortly before her death. That Lady Jane contrived
a solar dot matrix system to record her final med-
itations seems, in retrospect, less important than her
mode of expression, the lyric, the haunting quali-
ties of which Mark Strand has described: “Lyric
poetry reminds us that we live in time. It tells us
that we are mortal. It celebrates or recognizes moods,
ideas, events only as they exist in passing....
Lyric poetry is a long memorial, a valedictory to all
our moments on earth.” In medieval lyric, the ubi
sunt motif emphasizes the transitoriness of life and
implies the decadence of the current epoch by in-
voking an idyllic past. The carpe diem theme of the
Renaissance lyric exhorts young lovers to “seize
the day” and embodies the spirit of “Let us eat and
drink, for tomorrow we shall die.” And yet the tem-
poral aspects of the lyric also embody a singular
paradox, inasmuch as words betoken absence, the
absence of the objects and images that they de-
scribe. Indeed, the amorous sonneteer of the late
sixteenth century claimed the power to confer im-
mortality on both himself and his “cruel fair.”
The lyric typically eschews the strictly linear
development essential to epic and dramatic verse,
but this does not divest the form of a remarkable
range of moods. It may be meditative (Thomas
Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”), admon-
itory (Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”), elegiac
(John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”), apocalyp-
tic (William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Com-
ing”), celebratory (Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in
October”), or iconoclastic (Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”).
Because the lyric derives from the personal emo-
tions of the poet, its themes may be exalted or
quaint or both (as in Richard Witbur’s “Death of a
Toad”). Most importantly, it draws cogency and
force from the poet’s facility with language, relying
on rhythm, syntax, diction, image, and metaphor to
engage the reader. Some critics would even argue
that lyricism is not so much a form as a manner ofPortrait of a Couple at Century’s EndAlthough youthful
emotions appear transient
within the larger context of
the century’s upheaval, the
charred match-end that
once blossomed into flame,
however briefly, betokens
an innocence and passion
long spent.”