Hospitable Poetry #7

Zane Paxton on "Scaffolding" by Seamus Heaney

If you are new to our series, here is the link to find the intro and the six previous posts by Renee Emerson, A. A. Kostas, Brit McReynolds, Mark Rico, Esther Jane, and Kilby Austin.

If you have children who enjoy poetry, you will want to check out Zane Paxton’s nonsense poems for children such as “David Dottle Found a Bottle" and the whimsical "A Plum for a Thumb.” I read "The Grim” to my sons around a campfire last autumn and highly recommend the pairing. One of my favorite poems of Zane’s is “Hewn,” a beautiful meditation on the physicality of work and an embodied celebration that invites all the senses into the imagery. He writes an ongoing series of poems on fatherhood I always enjoy. Zane is an encouraging voice on Substack, quick to lift others up, and willing to do the hard work of writing. Like all of the writers in this series, his voice is free from the taint of AI, and I encourage you to subscribe to him and enjoy his poetry. Zane’s selection for a hospitable poem is brilliant, and I can’t wait to hear from you in the comments.

Love, Abigail

Still Life with Figs and Bread by Luis Meléndez (1770)

Scaffolding
By Seamus Heaney

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

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Reflection by Zane Paxton

Every Thursday night, I share over two hours with a small group of men. We are all battling addiction. Most are blue-collar types, from modest Midwest backgrounds: simple men, rough hands, broken families, and painful pasts. I’ve seen them all cry. I’ve cried in front of them. When I ask myself, “Is poetry really for all people?” these are the men who come to my mind. I wonder at times—but I’m still convinced, yes, poetry must be for everyone.

You might think I’m crazy to assert that a love poem would be hospitable to these men, and I would agree. Most often, when we think of a love poem, or a romantic lyric, it does not conjure up images of men in steel-toed boots crawling inside bobcats to dig in the dirt—men who take their smoke breaks in hard hats and fight the tyrannical cold every single day of winter. But that doesn’t mean poetry can’t be for them; it just means most often it hasn’t been. Maybe not all poetry is for all people, but when the right poetry finds the right person . . . well, it’s hardly describable.

“Scaffolding,” by Seamus Heaney, was a poem that drew me in the moment I first began scanning its lines. It is, by Heaney’s own words, a rather “confident and open”^[1] kind of poem. The verses contain simple vocabulary, a solid metaphor, and clear rhyme; yet the poem’s impact is anything but rudimentary. The language is quite physical; the labor and intentionality can be felt, which gives the turn at the end, with its hint of romance, a powerful undeniability. It is, indeed, a love poem; one with an awful amount of hope in it. Love, being the muse of poets from before the page, never fails to inspire; perhaps because we never cease to obsess over it.

The real power of Heaney’s poem, and any good poem for that matter, is that it burgeons in the heart of the reader. The next time one of my friends takes down scaffolding, all of a sudden his mind will be ringing with love, and he will think of his wife, or a friendship, or possibly even his God, and the work of his hands will transfix him to the realm of transcendence. When next he argues with his spouse, he may just pause and think of all his toil that week, and why he has done it. He may think of how beautiful that work is. Then, he might look into his wife’s eyes, and lose all the intensity of his self-justification and see that she is the most precious thing he has ever happened upon, that his marriage is the greatest thing he has ever built, and his next words will be, “I love you.” What I mean is, good poetry becomes something, not only on the page, but beyond the page where it meets actual embodied experiences.

Now, I’m not so naive to suggest that this happens immediately upon reading one poem one time; I’m only saying that poetry offers this, and its offering is open for everyone. Poetry is as much for the prison inmate as the college professor. For the anxious high schooler as much as the growing toddler. It’s for the mother crawling out of bed at her newborn’s cry and the grandfather faced with leaving his forever home. Poetry is for all people because all people need language for their experiences, but not just any language; rather, language that is patterned to express beauty, even the beauty of being a Midwest construction worker struggling with addiction.

Construction Site by Louis Lafon (1880s)

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^[1] Seamus Heaney reads ScaffoldingYouTube · Faber BooksJun 4, 2009