Our first thought was to title our Symposium “Hurry Up Please It’s Time.”  We took time to reconsider and revise.  But T. S. Eliot’s hectoring command does seem apropos; its repetitive, nagging, ALL-CAPS imperative could be a bumper-sticker for the modern age.  The increasing velocity of everything from our late understanding of elemental particles to transportation and communication to you-name-it.  Hurry Up Please It’s Time appears five times in the mere thirty-four lines of that grungy late-night bar scene in The Waste Land. 

What’s the hurry?  What is gained in the hurry?  Turns out, many things are gained. 

 But more important, what is lost?  In the great Middle English poem, “Patience,” this line is the first and final line of the poem, and runs throughout: “Pacience is a poynt, Þa3 hit displease ofte.” That is, "Patience is a virtue (point), though it often displeases." 

Patience is a virtue, but time is the issue: the ever-present rogue, the spoilsport in the rhetoric of the lyric poem.  Time is what the lyric poem—naively, maybe knowingly, with a wink or a sigh—wants to resist, defeat, abolish altogether.  Chidioch Tichborne’s singular self-elegy expresses this desire as a mindboggling paradox. His execution in the Tower is just hours away, so his wish is urgent and, as he knows, impossible:

             I sought my death and found it in my womb,
             I lookt for life and saw it was a shade,
             I trode the earth and knew it was my tomb,
             And now I die, and now I am but made.
             The glass is full, and now the glass is run,
             And now I live, and now my life is done.

        If we can contrive to stop time, the lyric poet dreams, then we’ll live forever, we will be young forever, our love will last forever, in an ideal spring; and some ideal, melodic tone will ring in our instant’s pure forevermore.

The lyric doesn’t really believe this, of course, nor do we.  Sir Walter Ralegh’s reply to Christopher Marlowe’s glib shepherd is a fit reply to the trippy enchantment of stopping time: “If all the world and love were young, / And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,” so Ralegh commences to obliterate those “pretty pleasures” that Marlowe pledged.  After all, all the beautiful promises “Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten: / In folly ripe, in reason rotten.”

The enchantment of supposing or pretending we can stop time’s fleet passage is a form of wooing or dreaming.  Sometimes it’s even a manner of critiquing the system—and the hierarchy—of time-telling and history-unfolding itself.

So I’m talking here about poetry, time, and patience.  But when I say poetry, I mean two distinct and two very at-odds things.  Poetry the career.  And poetry the art. 

How does poetry the art ask us—require us—to slow down?  Syntax, line break, phrasing, difficulty, rigor.  And I don’t just mean the poems of Hopkins or Dickinson or Geoffrey Hill.  But also the plainer ones with their images, patterns, and figures—Ted Kooser, for instance, or Buson’s haiku.  Poetry is about rereading, returning, tracing back in time, then going forward more slowly with a deepened, meditative awareness.  I want to think about the increasing velocity not just of the poem, but alas, of the poet—his work, her career, and the anxious imperatives to write quickly, to publish immediately, and move on.  For Chrissake, I wanna say, look out where you’re going!

So the career.  I’m begging the question of whether poetry is a career.  Teaching, yes, it’s a long, honorable career path, though we know it’s fraught with the hazards of timetables, schedules, and now, a pervasive corporate oversight with its zillion templates, accountabilities, AI hazards, reactionary censors, all of them requiring immediate attention.  But poetry?  I have always aspired to be a lifelong, devoted amateur—and I confess I’m in the minority: no agents, no snazzy AI-prepared social media stuff.  We do have some career poets now, and you can name them, and a few of them are actually writing wonderful work.

But what else does poetry-the-career look like?—a career so competitive, with everyone looking over everyone else’s poems; or rather, everyone else’s resumes, or rather web and media sites.  We’re freaking each other out in panicked comparisons.

Exhibit A:  poets spending more time assembling those very resumes, social sites, residency lists, and acknowledgments and, well, you know.  What if that time were spent working on the poems?

Exhibit B:  National Poetry Month.  It’s a good enough idea, but it’s also another aspect of PR.  I mean, Poetry Relations, po-biz.  I’ll remind us that April, the “cruelest month,” is not just National Poetry Month but also—to provide some ironic context—National Irritable Bowel Syndrome Month, Kite Month, and Sports Eye Injury Awareness Month.  Then there’s NAPOWRIMO, when we are to write a poem a day for a month, which seems to me like hell.  Maybe it’s great for the rapid production of ideas, drafts, notions, but a poem a day for a month? Do we need thirty more hasty, unfinished poems?

How about work every day for a month on one or two poems?  One of the results of NAPOWRIMO is that those many practitioners will then immediately submit those poems; and not to one magazine, but simultaneously to many magazines.  Why?  Promotion, tenure, professional reviews, and the poet’s private bedevilments of affirmation and validation.  It’s probably one reason why the relation of poetry editor and poetry submitter has gotten so antagonistic and mean—time and the impossible numbers of submissions in the queue.

 Exhibit C:  I got into the elevator at the last AWP and three young poets were standing there looking each other over.  OhmyGod, said one—perfect poetry shoes.  Where did you get them?  Poetry over-the-shoulder bags.  Po-biz outfits.  My daughter refers to us all as P.I.B.’s.  She means, people in black.  It’s a vibe.

Exhibit D:  Effect on the writing by the hastening career.  In prose fiction, just as example, we have the short story.  The short short.  Flash.  Flash-flash.  Ultra-flash.  Micro.  Micro-mini.  Teachers are dropping longer, difficult novels from their syllabi.  Or assigning radically condensed versions. The hypercompact version of literary genres suits a workshop-sized packaging—a very short thing is feasible to assign, write, and workshop in the artificial parameters of the time allotted.

Exhibit E:  In a recent conversation with the head of critical theory graduate program at an ivy university, she moaned that her Ph.D. students can’t read the hard stuff. They aren’t interested in anything before 2010.  And they won’t take time to learn or try.

Exhibit F:  Questions.  Are you writing a poem, or a book?  Do you see your work as a     

poem or a project?  Are you making a work of art; or a capital commodity?  The project appeals more to universities boards and committees, advertisers, grant-giving organizations with a need for quantification and summary.  Work of art as nifty package.

There’s so much more evidence—and so little time. I know you know what I’m trying to identify here. The career of poetry means speed, velocity, zippy production.

So I’ll move ahead to ask, what does the poetry itself tell us about hurrying up?  I mean,

poetry the poem, the art, not poetry the career.  Our poet laureate Arthur Sze has said in a new interview: “Poetry necessitates that we slow down, deepen our attention, practice care with language and with each other; poetry is an essential language…and it affirms our shared humanity.” How does the poem slow us down? 

To answer Arthur I give you Alexander.  I know no better manual on poetic style than Pope’s “Essay on Criticism,” where I find some of the clearest representation of velocity and deliberation in poetry.  It’s Pope; it’s 1711:

         True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
        As those move easiest who have learned to dance
        'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
        The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
        Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
        And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows,
        But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
        The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar,
        When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
        The line too labors, and the words move slow;
        Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
        Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.

Pope clearly does prefer the middle path, the moderate and reasonable style.  But I hold that poetry’s resources, its tactics and methods, are generally the opposite of those compelled by Poetry the Career.  The Art says slow down.  It says, believe it or not, reread, then re-re-read, make time slow down and even go backwards. The great poems, and the good ones, reward that kind of re-vision by clarifying, deepening, revealing not just the story, the data, the aphorism, the thematic argument—that dreaded, summarizing take-away—but by revealing the art, all the subterranean, accompanying, interior riches of the language and of the mind. 

We typically read in two dimensions, but poetry says, it’s three, maybe it’s four; there’s strata here, a deep geology to every word, gesture, and usage.  A word is not just surface data; it is a memory of itself.  Sure, sometimes the quick velocity of a poem is part of the point and the charm.  Think Frank O’Hara, or Ginsberg and his “first thought, best thought”—though doesn’t Ginsberg’s adage tend to make for better first drafts than finished poems?

So here are a few quick, personal bullet points about slowness and poetry.

Paradox:  the shorter the line, the slower the reading.  I love this aspect of the art.  The more complex the syntax and phrasing, the slower the reading.  Why go slow?  Because to come to the end is the death of it all.  Of the art, of the intensity, of the shared music, and of that essential self-reading-the-poem.

Difficulty, of which there are so many flavors in poetry, is another vehicle for deliberation and deep engagement.  Geoffrey Hill makes a great case for the necessary beauty, even the socio-political necessity, of difficulty. “But think on: that which is difficult / preserves democracy; you pay respect / to the intelligence of the citizen.” 

Allusion, reference, metaphor, conceit, rhyme, all the intense figural and musical attributes of the lyric poem are contrived to make us slow down.  The impediment is a way of saying, pay attention, linger inside the artifice, the intensity, and the artful rigor of the thing.  Be mindful, attentive, and actively engaged in the enjoyment, in the making of meaning and music.

I could select just about any poem to demonstrate poetry’s case for patience.  But who’s a better example of poetry’s slowness, its impediment-as-attention than Gerard Manley Hopkins?  His great poem, one of the “terrible” sonnets, was written in 1885 and first published in 1918: 

             No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, 
             More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. 
             Comforter, where, where is your comforting? 
             Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? 
             My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief- 
             Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old ánvil wínce and síng — 
             Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling- 
             Ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.'
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               O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall 
             Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap 
             May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small 
             Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, 
             Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all 
             Life death does end and each day dies with sleep. 

I’ll summarize the radical variety of Father Hopkins’ tactics here, the ways he uses a whole toolbox of poetry’s resources to create a deliberate, extremely slow-moving, wholly brilliant poem.  Besides, as I pointed out earlier, when we get to the end, we have no choice but to fall off the massive precipice into where?—hell, death, oblivion?  What’s the hurry indeed?  What are some of those particular lyric resources?

Sentence structure.  To fully exploit the resources of the sentence, Hopkins uses all four types of sentence: declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory.  And he employs all four sentence forms: simple, compound, complex, compound-complex. In this short poem, his sentence structure is polyphonic, sophisticated, and powerfully unsettling.

Notice his rhythm.  Hopkins is famous for his self-identified “sprung” technique. The language, the movement from word to word shows his emphasis on heavily stressed syllables. It is the sound and rhythm of intensity, impediment, danger, significance. Count the beats.  Just look at first and last lines: They are entirely monosyllabic; and more so, they are freighted with accents.  How many do you hear in the first line?  Is “No worst” a dactyl?  There may be as many as seven, even eight heavy stresses in this one line.  Are there seven downbeats in the final line?  These lines simply cannot be read quickly or lightly.  They demand our patience and our deliberating attention.

Line strategies.  Heavy, intense enjambment provides rigor.  His hyphenated and broken words (“ling/erring”) likewise establish a formal peril and calamity.  The heavy hyphenates and strange phrases and terms remind us, too, that Hopkins was a teaching scholar of Anglo-Saxon as well as Latin, Greek; he makes great use of the Anglo-Saxon caesura, pausing often midline with those further manifestations of impediment, peril, and heightened deliberation.

Narrative strategies.  The short poem is packed with references, allusions, and complex conceits—each of which requires both rereading and extratextual coordination, as the reader works to unpack the poem’s intricate patterns of narrative, imagery, metaphor, and more.

All of Hopkins’ tactics, as I said, reinforce a need—a natural and spiritual mandate—for deliberation, care, focus, and slow reading.  We should savor poems, not gulp them down.  I reiterate my case that poetry the career and poetry the art have very little to do with each other. One says, Hurry Up Please It’s Time!  The other waits for us, offers a place for attention, meditation, and the challenge of engagement and belonging, rather than a consumer assembly line or a whip-snapping supervisor.

Perhaps it’s always been this way.  But our current means of capital production and the spinning velocity of technology and social media have heightened the anxiety by several orders of magnitude. 

 It takes a real poet to articulate these things in artful ways.  This is all poetry’s long lesson, and it’s as true today as ever before.  In fact, here are a few lines from Jorie Graham and her visionary poem, “You Shall Not Speak,” from her brand-new book Killing Spree.  The poem is about (if they are “about” anything) velocity and patience, existential doubt and the dizzy certainties of our unknowing:

                             Where is it
        we’re headed. So fast. But is this fast? I must speak

         what is in my
         heart. I don’t know
         if there’s anything left now in
         my heart.

                     . . . I must
         open my soul—
         I feel it still around me
         here—but where—I just

         had it—it might be years—maybe
         it’s days—
         I feel I had it
         just minutes

         ago . . .
                     we have been waiting in it
         forever.

Some ideas and instances here derive from my earlier essay, “To Think of Time,” from Radiant Lyre, ed. by David Baker and Ann Townsend.

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