The Penis That Killed Jeffrey City

The most important thing in life, my father taught me, is to make good money. He was a child of poverty, and I think what he really meant was that the most important thing in life is to fit in. Having a stable middle-class income would have allowed him to do that. But I was young and didn’t think much about fitting in. In fact, I spent most of my childhood reading. It also never occurred to me that I might not be able to make a living. And so I became a poet.

I spent ten years working in the Poetry in the Schools program in Washington State, Alaska, Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming. I went from school to school helping kids write poems. Once, in Miles City, Montana, I was trying to get across to a group of sixth-graders the power of our senses — as well as the dislocation and excitement we feel when we do something out of the ordinary. So I asked them to lick a tree.

Correspondence

David Romtvedt responds:

Rhyme and meter are used in various ways in different languages and cultures. Some languages are rhyme rich and tend to have a literature that includes lots of rhyme. Rhyme is “easier” and appears more “natural” in such languages. But it is misleading to suggest that either rhyme or meter is a universal measure for what we define as poetry. Over the years I’ve found that many of us in the rural West can love both rhymed and unrhymed poetry. At the same time, there remains a divide between these two poetry worlds, and I’m saddened that on both sides of the divide there are accusations that what the other side cares about is not poetry.

I appreciate the sincerity of David Romtvedt’s essay “The Penis that Killed Jeffrey City” [December 2004]. His longing to reach out to others and help them to appreciate poetry seems genuine. I understand his disappointment when he finds that the rural Western population prefers traditional cowboy poems to the modern, nonmetrical poetry that he enjoys. I think he’s mistaken, however, when he writes that American poets after the First World War “got rid of rhyme in part to throw off elitism, to bring art and daily life together.” Nor is it true that “rhymed poetry reflected genteel Victorian artifice and class barriers.”

Romtvedt seems to focus on the absence of rhyme as the major difference between modern verse and traditional poetry. In fact, it is the failure to follow a regular meter that makes a modern poem not a “real poem.”

One doesn’t need a college education, or even the ability to read, in order to appreciate metrical poetry. We know it when we hear it. To tell if a poem has meter, read it out loud. Can you tap your foot to it? Does it write itself into your memory? Does your body, and not just your mind, respond to its cadences?

Poetry emerged from an ancient oral tradition. Meter, together with alliteration, assonance, and end rhymes, made poems easy to memorize. The ordinary people Romtvedt is trying to reach have an innate appreciation of this type of poetry.

Modernists seem to think that aesthetics is culturally determined. That’s why they abandoned “elitist” forms preferred by the bourgeoisie. But, in fact, we are now learning that some aspects of aesthetics are innate and hold true despite cultural differences. In recent experiments, subjects from different cultures and ethnicities chose the same pictures from a pile of photographs when asked to identify “beautiful” faces. Apparently, there is a deep appreciation of certain types of symmetry in all of us.

Anybody can recognize a metrical poem. Not everybody can write one, however. Is that the elitism that modernists rebel against?

Aya Katz Licking, Missouri

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December 2004