Poetry Month

This collection includes a number of my favorites.

Comments by Jeanne

April is National Poetry Month.

I know in some quarters that news will be greeted with a yawn or a shrug, the unspoken question being,  “Does poetry matter?”  Many people seem to equate poetry with high-falutin’ incomprehensible lines that have no relevance to everyday life or experience.  Poets are stereotyped as pale intellectuals who doen’t live in the real world, depressives who seek to spread gloom and doom or else air heads with lines about fragility and posies and, yes, doves and love—a cliché even in Shakespeare’s time.

I think a better question is, “What is poetry?”  and I can think of no better answer than to paraphrase Emily Dickinson who said that when the hair on the back of her neck rose, then she knew it was poetry.  Poetry speaks a profound truth that we can feel. Poetry says things we can all feel or know.  It may tell a story or express an emotion.

My mother loved poetry—a good thing, because she was an English teacher.  She had her students memorize poems back in the day, which they all professed to dislike.  Years later when we’d encounter a former student, most would start to recite some favorite they still recalled, decades later.  Mom believed in the power of poetry to express everything, albeit sometimes with a touch of exaggeration; or to at least cause a smile.  It was a sort of shorthand speaking.  When exhaustion would stop her labors in the garden, she would invariably quote, “I will lay me down and bleed awhile/And then rise to fight again.”  We knew she meant she was going to take a break and rest, and then would be at it again.  That same garden and the woodland would cause her to recall lines from her favorite poem, Thanatopsis:  “Go forth, under the open sky, and list/To Nature’s teachings.” An especially onerous task would begin with, “Into the Valley of Death/Rode the six hundred.”  The memory of a difficult decision might evoke lines from Robert Frost’s poem,  The Road Less Traveled:  “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--/ I took the one less traveled by, /And that has made all the difference.” Poetry in some fashion was woven into our lives just like cornbread and green beans, walks in the woods, or visits to grandparents.

I think my first favorite poem other than a nursey rhyme would have to be The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes.  It’s the tale of a robber and his sweetheart, the innkeeper’s daughter Bess. I could hear the horse’s hooves clopping in the beat of the lines, see the moon as a “ghostly galleon tossed on cloudy seas,” foreshadowing the fate that awaits.  It was heartbreaking, heartstopping, and thrilling all at once.

I still shiver at the thought of those last lines of the poem.  I’m not going to quote them here.  If you don’t know the poem, you should discover it for yourself rather than have it spoiled by a hack blogger.
Most of us, if we think about it, have our own personal bits of poetry we think about at certain times.  The older I get, the more often have occasion to think of lines from Emily Dickenson:  “Parting is all we know of heaven/And all we need know of hell.”

Poetry even bursts onto the national consciousness at times. When many of us think of the Challenger disaster, the words we remember are from the poem High Flight by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. which opens, “Oh! I have slipped the surly  bonds of Earth” and ends with “Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”

Yet I have to admit that I’m not a great reader of poetry. I’ve thought on this and my conclusion is that for me poetry is meant to be be HEARD.  Sometimes words on a page just don’t capture the imagination and heart as do those same words read aloud.  Most of the poems I have taken to my heart are ones I’ve first encountered by listening to someone else read or recite. When I read them myself later, it’s still those lines that captured my ear that resonate the most.

If you’re the same way, you may want to plan to come to the library on Sunday, April 28, at 2:30 pm to hear some fine local poets read their work. Chrissie Peters, Rose Klix, and Nancy Fisher are all scheduled to appear, and they will have copies of their work for sale. You may come away with a new favorite poem of your own.

Update: The Sunday Bristol Herald Courier had an article about Chrissie Peters which you can read here.