I had not been reading poetry, and I felt a little twinge from time to time, but too busy, really, to think too much about it, or to miss it. Poetry would always be there, the slim texts were not about to remove themselves from my shelves.
Then I read Specimen Days and Michael Cunningham gave me Walt Whitman again. Sure enough, Leaves of Grass was right on the shelf where I’d left it. That’s the great thing about poetry. It’s meant to be read again and again.
Specimen Days is a novel, but the language is so brilliant, the stories so alive and complex, that the minute I finished it, I wanted to start again. Three stories, different characters, different time periods, but all connected in some way to Whitman’s poetry. And all with language that pays attention to sound and nuance. Words and ideas do beautiful things when arranged in artful ways.
The way I’ve been reading these days, I have felt almost as if my mind had been narrowed down to wanting only one kind of story: a story with a linear plot, a character I could identify with, and a satisfactory conclusion. A story, in other words, that went somewhere I could easily call up from my run-of-the-mill imagination.
What great writers like Michael Cunningham do is expand run-of-the-mill imaginations like mine. When books transfer imagination and brilliance and energy to the reader, they are special, almost magical. How do they do that?
I’m not sure. Maybe because in these stories the ride, not the destination, is everything. In these stories I linger over every sentence, reread them just because I love them. Like poetry, every line seems packed with elusive heartbreaking truths. And every ending resonates with what it means to be alive.