I’m not a poet.
Believe me, I know it.
I won’t even read it
Very much.
Exactly how did Shakespeare manage to write all those rhyming couplets? Or Emily Dickinson or Shel Silverstein or Dr. Suess? My one-minute feeble attempt at poetry is really about as good as it gets for me when it comes to busting rhymes. My admiration for those seasoned (and patient) poets goes up that much more.
Professional admiration is one thing. Reading and enjoying poetry is something completely different. Everyone knows that poetry is good for you like doing yoga or eating vegetables or wearing a toque in winter. But barely any slim volumes of poetry grace my bookshelf and none find their way to my bedside table to compete with my usual fiction picks. And yet, once in awhile, some random poetical lines will stop me short when I meet with them out in the wild like one of Mary Oliver’s geese.
During my first year university, I flipped open my Norton Anthology of English Literature and encountered the familiar “poem” Big Yellow Taxi by “author” Joni Mitchell. Ummm, hello? Mr. Norton? That’s a song. But noooo, I learned in class, actually, those are lyrics, which is a form of poetry. Adding music is what makes it a song. But the music in my head made the poem that much more palatable and understandable for me, adding that extra sensory experience. And poetry is supposed to be all about the senses, right?
I was reminded of this the other night while we were watching TV with the closed captioning on. The lyrics of an ambient song came up and I was struck at how much music plays a part in my being able to engage with the poetry. Suddenly, I felt deeply what the lyricist meant when The Faces sang, “I wish that I knew what I know now…” because I could hear it in the singer’s voice: there are some things you just can’t really understand until you’re older.
I’ve also discovered that I can enjoy entire novels in verse. When my online book club choice for the month was Elizabeth Acevedo’s YA novel The Poet X, I had my usual apprehension about reading poetry. My library solved that problem for me when only the audiobook version was available. Read by the author – without my botched Spanish pronunciations of her lovely dialectical additions – it was an immersive experience that would have lost something if told in prose.
Years ago at a writers’ conference I had a similar experience. At the closing banquet, I turned up my nose when I read that part of the entertainment would be someone performing Cowboy Poetry. How quickly I was schooled by the masterful recitation by an old gentleman cowboy telling his story by heart, in verse, with the mesmerizing lilt of an ambling horse. If I had read it for myself, I would not have done it justice.
In her book The Cloister Walk, poet-author Kathleen Norris advises against dissecting a poem in order to try and understand it, as if the parts are more important than the whole or “as if the purpose of poetry is to provide boring exercises for English class”: simile, metaphor, image. Maybe I need someone to read or sing poetry to me. My husband actually does a pretty good job of this when he gets into one of his let-me-read-you-all-the-lyrics-to-this-song-and-tell-you-exactly-what-it-means moods.
The whole act of writing is communal, after all. Unless it’s a diary (and even then sometimes), the transaction is only complete when someone reads it. It becomes that much more complex when someone reads it to you or an artist performs it, especially in person. I look forward to engaging once more in such communion of concerts and theatre, recitals and school concerts, hymns and choruses when this dang pandemic is finally over.