ABOUT POETRY

It all started after I had attended a number of poetry readings. I write but I seldom write poetry. At the readings, which were more or less well attended, the reader emoted his poems to the audience and each poem was followed by a collective sigh. I even found myself being part of that collective sigh. But, although I enjoyed the listening, deep down inside I had to admit that I didn't know what the poem was about. I refused to acknowledge my ignorance and, like all the others, said something like "Wasn't that wonderful". But I was hungry for meaning.

Then one day, at a reading at the Kelly House in Mendocino, I felt daring. I turned to my neighbor, someone I had known for a long time, and asked her if she understood the poem. To my surprise she said she didn't. Upon asking others I found that most of them didn't understand either, though they liked it. I was annoyed, upset, almost angry.

I remembered when, in New York City quite a number of years ago, I had been into oil painting. I wasn't a good painter, just a rank amateur. But I was into "meaningful" art and spent as much as six months on a painting that I called "The Orphans", or "The Eternal Swing", or "The Children of God". And I went to the Whitney Museum one day and looked at something entitled "White on White" or some such thing, and other canvases covered with random blotches of paint. I was annoyed, upset,
almost angry then.

Coming home from this exhibit I stormed into my studio, took out a large canvas and set it on the easel. I took a 6 foot-long rag, dipped it in oil and some odd colors and, standing several feet away, I whipped the canvas with color for 15 minutes. Then I took a long stick, tied a brush at the end, and drew several lines on the canvas from afar. The whole thing took less than half an hour. A few days later, when the canvas was dry, I framed it and hung it up on my living room wall, right alongside "The Apple Pickers" and "The Children of God". I called this one "The Joke" because, to me, that's what it was.

When people came to visit they looked at the paintings on my wall and nodded. But when they came to that one, they oohed and aahed, telling me that they saw storms, and ocean waves, and mysterious mountains and what not. When I told them that it was a joke, that I painted it in jest and anger, they nodded. "That's it" they insisted "Your anger shows on the canvas and makes it come alive. It doesn't matter what your intention was. It's a good painting because of it, not in spite of it." I never forgot that. Still I recognized that I had no real conception of color or perspective, and I gave up painting.

So here I was many years later, coming away from a poetry reading, feeling the same kind of annoyance, anger, and rebelliousness.

When I got home, I sat in an armchair with a pad and pencil and, in less than half an hour, I wrote 3 poems, in jest, or so I thought. I then read them to my wife. When I was finished, I heard a small sigh coming from her, a sigh not unlike the ones I had heard at the readings. I think I even heard it from me.

When I re-read these three poems a few days later I found myself thinking that this one was better than that one, and that one was not as good as the other. Wow! A value judgment. That implies value, merit. I astounded myself.

In the next few days I wrote some 18 poems, all of them at night, all of them in spurts over brief periods of time, and all of them without intention or conscious thought. I don't know why, but I liked them. Still it bothered me that I had put so little time and effort in them, and without it I thought they had little merit.

Then I remembered having gone to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam some years ago. As I looked at the paintings I noticed the year in which they were painted. It astounded me to see the huge number that were painted in the same year. There must have been over 250 of them. Then there were sketches and what not. And I knew there were works of Van Gogh in other museums around the world. He must have completed a painting in a few hours, I thought to myself in awe.

One day I spoke of this to a friend and he said something that I recall now. He said "No! Of course not! It didn't take Van Gogh a few hours to paint a canvas. It took him thirty some-odd years to get to the point where he could paint a canvas in a few hours." The meaning of what he said is now clear to me.

I guess it took me over sixty years to get to where I could spontaneously come out with a poem in a relatively brief period of time. I look at these poems and recognize events in my past woven in and out of them, subconscious thoughts and emotions which pierced through when I allowed the words to flow without filtering them. So now I write poetry without criticism or apology.

Jay Frankston
wlp@mcn.org