The first poems you loved – Summer flu edition

I confess to having been in bed all day today due to a sudden onset of flu, complete with middle-of-the-night stomach upset and fevers that make me flushed and hot and then freezing, so forgive me if I indulge in a little nostalgic reminiscing. You can blame the fever! Although I was productive yesterday, today it took all of my mental and physical energy just to catch up on reading magazines. I just read Mary Ruefle’s lovely essay in Poetry Magazine’s 100 Years issue, and her essay made me reminisce about the first poems I fell in love with. My mother went back to college, having dropped out when she was 18 to marry my father, when I was in grade school, and so during her classes she would share what she learned, read me her textbooks out loud. I especially loved two of her books – a biology text by Stephen J. Gould and X.J. Kennedy’s Introduction to Poetry (the 1969 edition.)
Two poems I first loved, I remember being nine, were John Berryman’s Dream Song that begins “Life, Friends, is Boring” and T.S. Eliot’s beautiful ode to middle-aged insecure men, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” My mother would read these poems out loud to me, and we would laugh and repeat our favorite phrases to each other throughout the day. The first poem I ever memorized was e.e. cummings’ “anyone lives in a pretty how town” for a middle school poetry recitation contest. The second was Louis Simpson’s “My Father in the Night Commanding No,” pretty much still the best disaffected suburban childhood poem ever. Mad Men has nothing on this poem in terms of mood and tone, trust me. Though both of these poems had a set rhyme scheme, both seemed to be written in casual, conversation language, none of that awkward phrasing that characterized (I thought as later as a teen in English classes) those terrible Romantic poets. Wordsworth and Longfellow? No thanks! And honestly, while I admire a rhyme that doesn’t call attention to itself, I’d still rather read something that at least seems like free verse, that doesn’t seem…well…caged or trapped in its form. Shakespeare aside. 
I was awfully young at nine and ten to understand or identify with Eliot’s early midlife crisis (he was in his twenties when he wrote Prufrock, FYI) and it’s curious to think about why I loved the poem so much. It’s great sonics? The sense of humor? The precarious sense of decay and disaster? The slightly whining tone and the sense of irony in both this and “Life, Friends…” would seem totally outside the experience of a nine-year old girl who grew up on a farm in Knoxville. I read these poems out loud in my room, memorizing the poem by repetition, trying different inflections, different tones and speeds, trying to understand the mindset of the writers.
I wonder how these poets affected me as a person and a writer, how the idea of humor from Eliot and Berryman being important in poetry, how Simpson’s use of surrealism heightened the sadness of his poem by making it slightly dreamlike, how their tricks might have slipped into my own work over the years. Once in a while I’ll be re-reading a poem – maybe Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom I loved in sixth grade, or H.D., whom I loved as an undergrad – and I’ll notice the echo of one of their lines in a poem I had just written. Now that I am, ahem, middle-aged myself – quickly approaching forty, not thirty – do Berryman and Eliot’s angst resonate any more than they ever did? The magic of poetry is the willingness of a nine-year-old girl to imagine a thirty-year-old man’s fear of balding, a child to imagine the state of mind that would render great art and literature dull. What were the first poems you loved? How do you think they’ve affected you?