Professing The Emotional History of the Human Race
Sarah E. Isbell
Mad River Union
HUMBOLDT – In our continuing series on local poets you should know, the Union brings you an interview with College of the Redwoods poetry professor David Holper.
I began by asking Holper what might seem to be a simple question: What makes great poetry?
“That is a complex question,” Holper replied, “but on a simple level, it’s a stirring of emotions within us. Something that taps into that part of us that lives under the surface just waiting to be awoken. And it comes from details, or sound, or voice.”
It’s an immediate recognition, Holper said, “When it’s just kind of dead on the page or dead through performance, you can see the difference between what’s powerful and what’s not.”
Holper works to pass on what might seem like an intuitive skill to his students. “When I train student editors for the literary journal for College of the Redwoods, I just tell them, if you read it and it doesn’t do anything for you, just pass it by, you’re just looking for the things that really speak to you on some level. I think poet laureate Billy Collins, in an interview a few years ago, said that ‘Poetry was the emotional history of the human race.’ And I think that’s a keen observation. It’s simple in a certain way, but it is, it’s the emotional history of our species.”
There’s also a personal connection. “I like a poet to find a way to articulate something I’ve sensed or intuited or thought myself, but I’ve never put to words before. Or, give me a new insight into something that I saw, that I kind of maybe sensed, but I have never (really given voice to).
“I love poems that take something that’s rather ordinary and make it extraordinary. I think that’s really the poet’s job. And that’s when a poem is really great, when what’s ordinary, that what we observe daily, becomes extraordinary, and the poet is able to take that and show us what is extraordinary in it.”
Poetry as a dangerous act
Both traditional verse, and in particular, slam poetry, may often use that same emotion response to spur a call to collective social action. “I always tell my students that they should read Plato’s Republic because in there he has a section on the poets, and he says they’re the most dangerous, they’re the revolutionaries, they’re the ones that speak truth to what’s happening in society, and they’re dangerous, and we can’t have them in this perfect society we’re building,” said Holper.
“So I always tell the poets that I teach, you’re the rebels, you’re the ones who want to really speak the truth to what’s in our society, and that’s a dangerous thing in a society like we live in, because there are so many lies, and there’s so much deceit and fraud about how we live our lives, that to speak the truth in an environment like this is a dangerous act.”
Poetry out loud
Over the years, Holper, schooled in the Iowa method of teaching poetry, has changed the way he teaches to more effectively reach the younger generations of students. Holper believes that poetry is meant to be spoken out loud, and encourages his students to do exactly that – to publicly perform their poems.
“I grew up where there was a really big dichotomy between writing poetry and spoken poetry,” he elaborated. “I grew up in the Bay Area, I think I was really drawn to the beat poets and to poetry performance, so I really like poetry to be said aloud, to be performed, but as an academic, I also dwell in the world of a page.”
Holper now passes on that love of the spoken word to the younger generation of students. “Every class now that I teach in poetry opens with an open mic,” he said. “Whatever they write. I don’t care what it is. Something that they want to perform. They have to get up in front of the class, stand up, and perform it.” At the end of the semester, his students give a public performance of the best poems they’ve written during the semester at the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka.
Holper serves as a judge for Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry performance competition for high school students. “First, they have to learn really good poetry, and then how best to give voice to it.” (More about Poetry Out Loud can be found at poetryoutloud.org.)
Holper himself uses public performance to discern the quality of his own work. “I had the crowd,” he said of one performance. “You could feel it. There’s a palpable feeling in the room when you have the crowd versus when you don’t, and when the crowd in the room is electrified by what you’re doing and when they’re not. And if you know how the poem is to be performed and the audience gets it, and you know they get it while you’re doing it, it’s like riding a wave, a perfect wave, and that’s a great experience.”
An old form meets new technologies
Holper recently began posting his poetry to Instagram. He enjoys the instant feedback, which allows him to share his poetry and to polish and edit his work. “It’s an interesting era that we live in, because there are just so many different kinds of venues for poetry to exist,” he said. “You have the web, you have video, you have poetry slams.”
Holper harkens back to the 1960s, when poetry event promoters in the Bay Area put up hand-drawn posters, usually resulting in little boost to meager attendance. Today, Holper notes, a well-known traditional poet who has a print run of 20,000 books (which is a lot of books) barely holds a candle to poet R.M. Drake, who recently sold 100,000 copies of his poetry book to a million followers on Instagram. “Typically, when [Drake] posts a poem he gets 50,000 responses to it, that is an amazing reach as a poet in this society, said Holper. “I don’t even care that he’s doing mediocre work, I just think it’s great poetry is getting out to society in new ways that it didn’t do before.”
The nitty-gritty of technique
Holper draws inpiration from the works of other poets. “I think it was reading other people’s poetry to see what they were doing in end-jamming lines, or using line breaks to create new meanings, I became really curious to try that myself,” he said.
In his early career, the editor of a poetry journal advised him on how to better use punctuation and line breaks to create even more interesting, unexpected, meanings by arranging the words in such a way that the line breaks create new meanings on the page, a lesson Holper took to heart. “I’m doing a lot of that,” he said. “I want to play with the space on the page. I want, in my own poetry, to explore things that I want to try out. I want to try new things all the time.”
Holper cited his own poem, Fiction Lessons, as an example of how to effectively utilize enjambing and line breaks to create a new interesting self-sufficient line in between the two sentences, providing additional meaning emphasizing the poem’s overall message:
This is the way you learn
to tell a story. You must see
the man in the porcupine hat as he shuffles in his cheap shoes
“See,” said Holper, “I want to create new meanings by rearranging stuff on the page.”
On the ongoing allure of poetry, Holper concludes, “Once you learn what poetry can do in speaking to that level of emotion, whether you’re a reader of poetry, or a writer of poetry, a performer of poetry, you want to go back there. There are things that need to be said, that can’t be said in other ways. … It speaks to something much deeper, something that needs to be given voice. And what that thing is, I think it’s sort of nameless. You can call it a soul, or you can call it an itch. I call it an itch sometimes, an itch to speak, an itch to voice something that can’t otherwise be voiced.” "Candleflame"
If someone passes you a wavering candle flame in the darkness, remember
not to horde it, hiding the saffron warmth of the flames
greedily to your chest where no one can see it.
As foolish as it may seem, you must pass on this lambent flame to others,
others who will in turn do the same, so somewhere,
someone whom you will likely never see or meet,
a frail figure huddled shivering in the darkness, forgotten, alone
will awaken from their nightmare into the flame of hope. It is this simple act
of giving away what was never meant to be kept, you free
yourself—and that flame ignites other flames,
driving back the darkness one brilliant ray of love at a time.
- David Holper
