Doctor Northcutt’s Saturday Poetry School

Dr. William Northcutt is a State Gazette Staff Reporter and a former English professor

If you want to sell newspapers, a great man (me) once said, you’ll NEVER mention the word poetry. I think our Managing Editor Rachel Townsend (much greater than me) would agree, but she gives me relative freedom in my opinion columns.

Even while I was earning a PhD in literature, writing about modernist poetry, I often felt that poetry was useless.

But then again, everything is useless if you think it so. I’m looking at you who get all stupid about a bunch of guys or girls in shorts running up and down a room, bouncing a ball just to throw it through a hoop.

I wrote poetry years ago that was very bad poetry because I was trying to write good poetry. Sometimes, it was so sincere and so sincerely awful that I wouldn’t have blamed the Nobel Prize committee for having my writing utensils confiscated forever, my fingers chopped off, my typewriter broken. It was bad. I once started off a poem with the line, “For what, the string of pearls ...” It’s the darkest act I ever committed, even beating out my activities in the underground of Cold War Estonia.

You have probably written some bad poetry too. If it rhymes, it’s probably horrible. If it has the word “truly” in it, it’ll trip the gag reflexes. If it contains the phrases “by my side,” “in my heart,” or anything about wind beneath one’s flappers, I’d probably just stick my head in a bucket and lose my soup. Probably no matter what poem you showed me, I’d want to crumple it up and use its sincere awfulness as kindling for a fire, which would warm me while I laughed at you.

Interpretations of poems, sometimes, make me spital-angry. Please don’t tell anyone that Robert Frost’s poem “A Road Not Taken” is about doing things differently than others. You’ve missed three fourths of the poem, in which he tells you that the paths are really the same. In the last stanza, he says that years later, he’ll tell a different story to make himself look cooler:

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

The speaker of the poem admits he is going to lie. If you’re going to quote the poem, get it right.

A few months back, I was covering an event at Circuit Court. Judge Mark Hayes was speaking to folks who had graduated from the rehabilitation program. He began reading that Frost poem, and I thought, “OH NO: I had such respect for him!” But then, he said to these graduates, “There is some debate about what the poem means, but you can understand that you’ve taken a path less traveled ...”

My respect and admiration doubled for Judge Hayes. He knew what the poem meant, admitted it wasn’t the lesson he was giving them, but still used the poems to praise these folks who in their lives might not have ever been praised in any way. Poetry was not useless that day. In fact, Judge Hayes might have saved families and lives with it.

People who know I’m a poetry guy approach me sometimes to read their poetry. Yuck! Don’t do that. But I’m going to leave you with a bit of doggerel poetry because this is my column.

I’ve made fun of your poems,

but I’ve made fun of myself.

After all, I have my own bad poems sitting

Among good books in my shelf.

If I have to read your poems,

You’ll feel regret.

When I joke about them in State Gazette.

And yet, forget what I’ve said.

Instead: write, write, write.

Better than watching guys in shorts,

running the courts,

and dribbling on TV all night.