Five Poems that Make Sense of the Noise of Time

John Burnside presents five poems that transcend traditional notions of poetry as elitist, such as Federico García Lorca's 1924 poem, 'Farewell,' for The Guardian. "As old orthodoxies faded, they found ways to make sense of the noise of time, transforming it into a new and unexpected music," writes Burnside. Another example:

Marianne Moore, ‘The Steeple-Jack’ (1932)

The real scientific discoveries of the last century (uncertainty, incompleteness, fuzzy logic) presented us with a freedom that, for some, was unwelcome, even unnerving. That the world “out there” was not fixed (and that it was mostly not “out there” at all) left too much to Coleridge’s “shaping spirit of Imagination”; we had wanted certainty, order, progress. For Marianne Moore, however, the need to shape and give order to raw and uncertain data is an occasion, not only of one of modernism’s most formally inventive poems, but of a new philosophical perspective: “You can see a twenty-five- / pound lobster; and fish nets arranged / to dry. The / whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt / marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the / star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so / much confusion.”

“The Steeple-Jack” begins with a panoramic view of a New England whaling town much as Dürer might have painted it, before sliding into more uncertain, Van Gogh territory, where a storm on the land can “disturb” the stars in the sky, just as it disturbs the human-made star on the steeple. Yet, because of this very uncertainty, our sense of the power, and necessity, of the poetic imagination, which creates order from confusion moment by moment, is elegantly heightened – and in the process, Moore sketches out the basis for a fully ecocritical science of belonging.

Read all about 'em at The Guardian.