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.