Gentle Poetry
Must good poetry be emotionally urgent?
I got my copy of An Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry in the mail yesterday and opened it up to a random page: a new poet for me, Kostas Stergiopoulos, whom the editors describe as “Neo-Symbolist” with “melancholy and elegiac tones” and “gentle with dramatic moments interspersed” and “low-keyed... characterized by a certain purity.” Something about these editor notes! I dig them. They get me in the mood.
So here’s Stergiopoulous (born in 1926), the “gentle” and “low-keyed”:
In Gripoulkia You missed it once again, that peaceful corner, but when you find yourself there, you will want to leave again. So many trees so near the sea, the sea like a sword beneath the sun. There you can find cicadas in the sea. So many leaves tremble in the sea breeze. They seem so ancient within you, these things! It is no solution for you to turn your face away, choking with disgust but you can do nothing about it. Gusts from the past, like currents of cold air, suddenly make you shudder, the German brass and percussion Norwegian flutes. Listen how the sleds run and slip across the piano keys, how spring begins again in the ice! The rotting of the days slowly led you to total isolation, and so again you begin to find foolish the things that once consumed you. In Gripoulkia the Gripoulki go crazy around you They all became so small! Small in the morning, small in the afternoon and larger only in the evening.
“Gentle” poetry? Why not. (Is this poem really that “quiet?” Maybe… but let’s just go with it.) I have no qualms with this kind of poem, though I tend to despise the “quietist” poetry written by American poets. Is that because in America every speech act is political, and quietist art is thus a naive style, suggesting that “everything is fine” politically speaking, when it is not? Can a style exist merely to hold a moment in a reader’s life, to see them off safely into their day with compassion? Re-contextualizing the quiet poem in another place like Greece gives me space to wonder.
“I think a good poem needs two things: (1) emotional urgency, and (2) doing something interesting with language.”
Does the first criteria eliminate the gentle, “low-keyed” poem? There is certainly a wealth of well-written poetry that is not especially emotional urgent. Does it go in a different bucket (“pleasant” or “nice”poetry) than the artistically compelling or ambitious?
What do we do with the gentle poem?
T’ang poets could put us into a Zen state with couplets that were as quiet as the earth, yet still pulsing with emotion:
Sitting Alone with Mt Jingting Li Bai The birds have all upped and away, Even that one cloud has taken a holiday. Holding my gaze still Is just this one hill. 李白 独坐敬亭山 众鸟高飞尽，孤云独去闲。 相看两不厌，只有敬亭山。
(You can find dozens of poems like this on one of my favorite Substacks, Tang Poetry.)
If you are not enjoying Tang poetry you just aren’t trying. So one answer to the problem is to argue that the low-key poem is urgent, you just have listen harder.
With These Things and With Others Kostas Stergiopoulos With these things and with others, I didn't manage to see the springtime that was washed by two rains, before it announced my arrival and this due in the evenings more like a farewell than the coming of a triumph. I stayed at home alone with the cat. Patient dusk, without turning on the light. How melancholy the cat is this evening! She stands indolently, looks at the moon, as it just begins to gleam over the rooftops. As time draws short, you cannot say that you don't feel a certain chill as the fearful moment draws near. You grew tired of embracing emptiness, or better put, you lost hope. Black-feathered clouds journeyed in the heaven of your soul. The dark rooms gape open in back. In the silence you take heart and the furniture creaks. Your bones creak. And the cat is melancholy tonight.
A gentle poem but full of “feels.” It has key words like “emptiness” and “fearful moment” and “chill.” So it’s quiet with a dose of gothic shiver. Does that rescue the gentle mood? Don’t we get tired of always punctuating our peaceful moments with horror and sadness?
Another answer is to embrace the tranquil side of our emotional lives as also a worthy subject for artistic treatment. What is the beauty of such feelings and how can a poem capture it?
The counterargument: “If you think any moment is ‘quiet,’ you aren’t sensitive enough. You don’t see the urgency of time’s passing. You do not feel the existential precipice.” In this vein, it is naïve to see only quiet, and not to look behind it to the maximal, intense view of the world which it contains. I am sympathetic to this view too.
It is hard to sit for a long time in a non-urgent quiet. The urgent wants to break in. And that might not just be due to our impatient contemporary lives. Thus, the same poet who wrote “In Gripoulkia” also writes poems that allow the “desperate,” “existential” to burst through:
Brief Days Kostas Stergiopoulos These brief, these little days what joy their sun has! ... of Nahum, Habbakuk, Zephaniah the prophets.... Just as we're about to go to the heart of winter. These days, these urgent days, if they happen to have sun.... A brief joy concealing sorrow within it. As when the light of summer lessens and stretched out on the afternoon beaches they all watch the sun set. ... Saint Nicholas, Saint Spiridon, Anastasia the Poison-dissolver But Moby Dick suddenly surfaces, opening abysses of the sea, and our ship sinks in the darkness.
Both the quiet and the urgent live together in the same moment, ideally working in the same poet, whose poems play among these moods, reflecting our situation in this world. The opposite of urgency—whatever term we give that—also ennobles us. What are strategies for holding these opposing values under the tent of poetry without demeaning them?
Translations of Kostas Stergiopoulos by Amaranth Sites and Nanos Valaoritis, from An Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry (2003).
Art by Brooks Lampe (photo taken on train ride to in Greece).