M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

Permission for Poetry and Other Scandals
By Doug Talley

Rules were made to be broken, goes the old saw, offering convenient justification, as well as permission, for the exercise of a thousand personal whims. In truth, any rule made to be broken, on close scrutiny, is not a rule at all. Do not commit adultery, is a rule, such an injunction as is absolutely inviolable. But rules we mean to break are something altogether different – a parent’s arbitrary standard of neatness and good behavior, a social stricture dictated by some vague notion of our neighbor’s opinion, a self-imposed obligation we might deem virtuous. Such a rule remains in force only until good sense or expediency suggests another rule instead. Perhaps such rules become a trick of habit merely, or a custom more honored in the breach than the observance, as Master Shakespeare once slyly observed. 

Rules made to be broken lay at the heart of a good many hypocrisies, which in turn generate a multitude of delicious ironies and scandals. This hidden connection between the observance of supposed good form and the inevitable hypocrisy to follow is the very formula of Oscar Wilde’s success in the zany comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest. Virtually every character in the play is a surrogate for Wilde’s take on the rules of society. From our infancy we are taught never to tell lies.  But Wilde’s spokesman, Algernon, replies: My experience of life is that whenever one tells a lie one is corroborated on every side. When one tells the truth one is left in a very lonely and painful position, and no one believes a word one says. 

So Algernon eats all the cucumber sandwiches before a tea with his aunt, the Lady Bracknall, then tells her with an undisturbed conscience that there were simply no cucumbers at market that morning, not even for ready money. The lie is outrageous, and still we smile all the way through it. Algernon’s devotion to his gullet, we understand implicitly, must supersede any requirement for strict truth. 

After Jack has proposed to Gwendolen, and must therefore interview with her mother, he informs Lady Bracknall that unfortunately he has lost both his parents. Lady Bracknall sniffs in reply:  To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. After all, we understand quite clearly from Lady Bracknall, there is an order to good society that must be preserved at all cost. This, and all the rest of the delightful, preposterous humor of Wilde’s play derives from the premise that the rules of good society, so-called, are made to be bent or broken.

A Rule of This Column

When I began writing this column, one of my rules at the outset was that I would never publish my own poetry. The only exception would not really be a departure from the rule; from time to time I would have to provide my own English translations for poems of a foreign language. But the source poems would always be the work of another writer. I considered the rule sensible for two reasons. First, I wanted to promote the best poetry I could and would critique Dante, Herbert, Borges, and Alma, but would never consider my own work equal to that company. Second, I wanted to avoid even the appearance of self-promotion, always thinking it rather distasteful – an unseemly imposition on the readership – to trot out and display one’s own work, like the overbearing parent who invariably raves about Johnny’s latest report card.

But I suppose even this rule, at the risk of hypocrisy, was made to be broken. My reason for breaking it now is due, in part, to desperation. This month’s column was already past deadline and I had nothing to show for it. However, another reason for breaking the rule arose from a recent experience with my family over the holidays. My oldest daughter and her husband visited from Utah, and one evening we recounted the story of her birth. I remarked that I had written a poem about the experience, and rather uncharacteristically, since I do not even force my work on my own family, I retrieved a copy of the poem and read it for the group. I was somewhat surprised by the reaction; those who listened visibly connected with the poem.

This was surprising, because the reading of poetry for me has not usually provided any sort of social benefit. Poems, in my experience, do not really connect us one to another socially.  The reading of a poem is not conversation back and forth between reader and audience, but instead a rather demanding, unilateral monologue. Poetry does not normally induce social intimacy, but instead tends to be a solitary exercise. At its deepest level, we do not read poetry to connect with another at all, not even with the author, but to connect with ourselves alone.  We read it to find and to define our own nature, to sift out what is best in our own heart and mind. And all too often, we do not grant ourselves sufficient permission for the privilege. 

Permission to Break a Rule or Two

Much of our enjoyment in this life frequently derives from simply giving ourselves permission. Time and again we deny ourselves a worthy, legitimate, and even appropriate pleasure, only because we do not think to have the time, or the money, or the right. Granting ourselves permission for some solitary enjoyment like reading poetry, we might rationalize, would only be an indulgence, a word pregnant with censure. Yet always behind such thinking lurks some rule clearly made to be broken.  Reading or writing a poem is only the act of granting oneself time and freedom for reflection, an act as necessary to life as eating, or sleeping or breathing. Any rules contrived against honest reflection are rules to be broken indeed. 

After all, God himself offers us permission for poetry, who assured us once in revelation:

For my soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me, and it shall be answered with a blessing upon their heads . . . . And verily, verily, I say unto you, that this is my voice unto all.

And so I have granted myself permission to break a rule, and to offer below one of my own poems, with the hope it might induce others likewise to break a rule or two and indulge, if only for an hour, in the pleasures of their own aspirations for poetry. As always, the submissions of readers are welcome.

SOME FEW WORDS FOR THE PULSE OF THE WRIST

- Luke 22:44

One bleak winter evening a good doctor deftly cut
the umbilical cord wrapped three times around the neck
of my firstborn to save her from strangling to death.

An intern noted the moment precisely, seven past seven,
because once severed, the cord, like a garden hose
suddenly gushing water, whipped a circle of blood

| half way across the room against a pale yellow wall,
against the blue scrubs of those standing by the bed,
against the face of a clock fixed at seven past seven.

The splatter of blood on glass could have been a chime,
a red stripe announcing its own peculiar name for the hour.
Twenty years later on the eve of my daughter’s birthday

I rehearse the story again. I never tire of its strange beauty,
its happy ending returning over and over to smile at me.
This time I wonder whose blood stained the clock that night – 

my daughter’s, or her mother’s, or both – a blood shared
between them, a story they traded back and forth over time.
There was a dark moment also, if stories are believed,

when blood fell in Gethsemane for this child and mother.
Another good doctor wrote a most refined Greek
translated centuries later in the authorized English:

And his sweat was as it were great drops of blood . . . .
When I walked to my car that night I saw those words
etched in light, in a trail of streetlamps leading home

seemingly year after year from one century to the next
staking a course through a darkness no longer eternal. 
Sharing blood, the Innocent returned our innocence.

Stains on my own blue scrubs marked the happy ending,
the eternal round, and whose blood it was etched its name
indelibly across the face of time and all who bore witness