Today’s guest blogger is Eric Selinger, Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, where he teaches courses on poetry, pedagogy, and popular culture. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from UCLA, and is the author of What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry (Cornell UP, 1998) and the co-editor of several books, including Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections (UPNE / Brandeis, 2000) and Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (National Poetry Foundation, 2008); his essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, notably Parnassus: Poetry in Review. He has written lesson plans and pedagogical materials for Poetry Out Loud, the Poetry Foundation, and WGBH-Boston, and has been awarded five grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to lead summer seminars and school-year workshops on “teaching the pleasures of poetry.”
This morning, William Blake’s “The Tyger” is running through my mind—and through my shoulders. Four beats per line, four lines per stanza: that’s sixteen push-ups every quatrain. I’m gunning for a hundred, but I’m not there yet. Poetry helps.
I started this poetry/fitness kick last summer, when my wife introduced me to Steve Speirs’ book 7 Weeks to 100 Push-Ups. The first week or two went fine, but as the numbers in the final sets grew longer, I could only hit the target if I found something to focus on other than the aches in my delts and triceps. Metrical poems did the trick. Line by line, beat by beat, they held my attention, even as they let me calculate how far I’d gotten.
I started with “The Tyger,” not least because it’s a poem about power and energy. All those bits about wings and hands, shoulders and sinews, seemed to fit the task at hand, and when the Tyger’s “heart began to beat,” mine did too, quite audibly sometimes. I paced myself with one push-up per trochee or iamb, although in reality, like most tetrameter poems, “The Tyger” isn’t really written in feet. It does have a joke about them, though (“What dread feet,” indeed!). Rather, the poem’s falling rhythm spills forward across the printed line breaks, as in that amazing penultimate stanza, also known as push-ups #65-80:
When the / stars threw / down their / spears,
And wa / tered hea / ven with / their tears,
Did he / smile his / work to / see?
Did he / who made / the Lamb / make thee?
In practice, huffing and puffing away, those lines really read like this:
When the / stars threw / down their / spears, And /
watered / heaven / with their / tears, [gasp]
Did he / smile his / work to / see? Did /
He who / made the / Lamb / make thee? [gasp]
Every now and then, for variety—which helps to keep my mind off the pain—I’ve tried other poems, basically working with texts I’d already memorized. Some worked better than others: Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” for example, makes a great bedtime poem or lullaby, but it’s too lulling to get you pumped for that final set. Oddly enough, though, his elegiac love poem “When You Are Old” worked just fine, as did most of the Shakespeare sonnets I tried, and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” although it felt a little odd to stand up, winded and exultant, with “though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster” still ringing in my inward ear.
We often tell our students about the uses of poetry: the access it will give them to pleasure, to wisdom, to focused attention, to imaginative freedom. This term, though, I plan to mention this down-to-earth, practical use for the art as well.
Come to think of it, this could have all kinds of uses. “No homework to turn in? Drop and give me ‘Birches,’ son!”