In this week’s New Yorker is an interview with a grownup Daniel Radcliff.  He may have missed attending a good English prep school because his formative years were spent on numerous Harry Potter locations; nevertheless, as he says in the article, his tutors did a good job for him, traditionally speaking.

His new film role, which is why he was in New York and being interviewed, is playing Alan Ginsberg.  About Ginsberg’s sort of poetry, Radcliff said, “Without rhyme or metre, there’s the danger of getting rather self-indulgent and pretentious and a little lazy. Robert Frost compared it to playing tennis without a net.  It might be fun, but it can never quite be satisfying.”

I didn’t have tutors, but I was trained up on Lawrence Perrine’s Sound and Sense.  (I’m sure it was the first edition. The now late Dr. Perrine was actually head of the English Department my freshman year.)   So I am of one mind with Radcliff on the question of what makes poetry.  Perrine began by giving us Tennyson’s “The Eagle” and then made us paraphrase it as though we were describing the great bird for a science textbook to get his point.

“He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.”

It pretty much does all the things a poem can do, not that a poem has to rhyme or scan or alliterate, but I know as much about eagles from this poem as I have learned out on the Willamette watching them fly back and forth, showing off for me in my little red kayak.

About poetry, I never, ever get the poetry in The New Yorker and they never get mine, although I have submitted one or two for their consideration in the past.  Here is the last one  — and I mean the very last one.  They will never “get” another one.

Dear New Yorker Poetry Editor:

It’s not like a tree, falling in a forest,
not making a sound because
you
are not there.
What I write is not
not poetry
because it falls on deaf ears.
It’s not about you.
It sounds and shakes and moves
me.
I am and
it is.