stop and smell the parentheses...

You might wonder what my qualifications are to run a blog about poetry. The answer to that is very little. A) I can read and B) I really like it. I know that a lot of people don't think super highly of poetry. But I think that's because we feel kind of stupid if we don't get a poem the first time we read it. And then of course there are the teachers and others that ruin it for us because we HAVE to find whatever the author intended and there's always only 1 answer. In addition, there isn't a lot of instant gratification. Anyone that thinks they understand a poem after only reading it once, doesn't. We get impatient if our computer's take even a moment to download information and we tend to think our brains are the same way. If it doesn't download instantly it must not be worth our time. This is where poetry falls through the cracks. Here's what works for me: I have to slow down for a few minutes, read it through a couple times (and read it out loud, but that's a topic for another day), and then let it roll around in my head as I go about doing other things. Then come back to it late at night when I'm sleepy (not sure why this works, my brain is just in a different frame of consciousness, I guess) and then I read it again. That's when whole thing will come alive and something will make sense.

I was reading some Langston Hughes for my class (I'm a student once again) last night and found his tone and style thrilling. He contributed greatly to the Harlem Renaissance, a time period when African American arts began to boom, beginning just after the turn of the century lasting until around the 30s. Hughes wrote poetry as well as novels and plays. I am including a recording of him reading the poem. If you let it, it just might change the way you think. After all, isn't that the beauty of the poetry?

Negro Speaks of Rivers

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I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I'm not sure how to make this work, so in the meantime just copy and paste in your browser window: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mFp40WJbsA

Mending Walls

I have some neighbors that just don't like the Cottams. It's ok because I know it has something to do with generational differences and an old neighborhood that doesn't like change. When I read this poem the other day it resonated with some of the little neighborly situations we've had.

I'm on a Robert Frost kick so just know this might not be the last. R.F., as I like to call him, didn't find success as a poet until he was in his 40s. In fact, he didn't find success at anything up until that point. But he quickly became one of America's most beloved poets both during his life-time and since.

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

---

Isn't his statement just perfect? "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." I don't love a wall. I feel a little let down when I have these experiences that make me realize that there are some people that don't want you at face value; they would genuinely rather have you with your "walls" up, with your Sunday face on. Do "Good fences make good neighbors?" Even though experience would teach me otherwise, I have to keep believing that it's not the case.

In the beginning...

This is my first time.

I'm a newbie here in blogger-land, I mean. I don't want to bore you with the details, but I figure a little explanation about my motivation is appropriate, right? So here it is:

The world is a fast-growing place full of neato thingys.

There are swift ways to find information; better ways to print, copy, paste and photoshop; we can speak into the air with a tiny device in our hand connected physically to nothing and chat with anyone, anywhere around the world; the very air we breathe is in constant motion with information all the time, ready to download at any moment from the magic notebooks we carry around and hold on our laps.

While at school today my literature professor was emotional. Poetry, she told us, was not appreciated the way it once was. "It's becoming a dead art", my husband said. I can't let that happen without putting up my own little rebellion. And so... here I am. Ready to celebrate words, try to make them accessible and hopefully unearth some beautiful notions of both the past and the present. This is a blog about words.

And so without further adieu, I give you Robert Frost to begin with. A great American poet, anthologized and quoted so much we might be tempted to be find him trite or cliche. But I am again and again bowled over by his insight. We've all heard the Road not Traveled enough to recite it in Sunday School so here's one I have just discovered:

The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
he says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

It's in the last 2 lines that I am suddenly taken aback.

Since this is my first post and it's already lengthy I won't get into all my thoughts on the matter and bore you to tears. What I want more than anything, is to bring poetry to a format that is not for academic purposes, but to relate it to our everyday lives.