Bonnie "Prince" Billy at a show in Dallas / Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
I’m a professor of poetry, more or less, but sometimes I
find myself exhausted by the intense focus that poems demand of me. (Wallace
Stevens can be especially exhausting—though well worth the effort.) Naturally,
my students tend to get fed up with poetry’s opacity too. Who doesn’t? So I was
pleased as Punch to find a short piece in the June issue of Poetry that takes on the topic of tricky
poems from the point of view of someone intrigued but frustrated. It’s called
“To Hell with Drawers,” and it was written by Will Oldham, the songwriter who
goes by the name Bonnie “Prince” Billy and whose bearded visage I remember from
movies like Old Joy.
The trouble is, you can’t read the damn thing online. In
fact, “To Hell with Drawers” is the only thing from the June issue that the
magazine doesn’t allow access to. So
I’ll tell you about it.
In his central metaphor, Oldham sets up a contrast with prose: while prose arranges its contents neatly on shelves for
inspection, he says, poetry hides them away in drawers. And Oldham doesn’t like
drawers, even if he loves what they contain. “There must be shelves,” he
writes, “where the contents are visible. When things are hidden in drawers,
they do not exist. Prose is shelving.” Come to think of it, this is precisely
why many of my students enter my course wary of poetry: they don’t want to have
to open all those drawers. Or maybe they’re afraid that they won’t even be able
to open them.
Yet I would argue that much of the pleasure of reading poems
comes from opening the drawer and sorting out what’s inside of it. A poem that
you find bewildering at first can later give you a sense of real satisfaction when you’ve figured out just what it’s up to. Auden knew this. He once
explained that he took a workmanlike approach to reading poems, asking himself,
“Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?” And really, figuring out what
a poem is doing turns out to be a pretty straightforward task, since the poem
itself tells you which questions to ask. Why is there a line break here? Why do
those words alliterate? Why is this stanza so long and the next one so short? Why
is that word used and not another? This pragmatic method is something I try to
pass on to my students.
