Word After Word

Reading poetry isn’t like reading at all, really. It’s more like making something in the dark with a mysterious playful funny friend. You don’t really know exactly what the two of you are doing, but you’re curious enough to follow the action line goes.

I always tell my students reading poetry is like tasting Tang or Jello crystals, or boullion: it’s intense. To make it into something that goes down, nourishes you, you add water by reading, reading, and reading the poem again. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense completely or at all. You keep washing over it, letting it wash over you. It’s slow.  Reading the newspaper is like eating dinner standing up. Reading poetry is making pizza from scratch. Even the dough. Maybe even the table itself. Maybe even the hands, the maker.

I want you to read my poetry but I wish you could hear it out loud, too. To fully appreciate a poem, you have to hear the poet read it, or someone who wishes they’d written the poem read it, out loud. And you have to read it silently over and over and be with it, like you be in church. Reverent, open to mystery. Comfortable with not knowing. Eager to sniff joy. If you just hear poetry read out loud, though, that’s no good either. It goes too fast. The poet reading gives all this breath and life and origination to the poem, and that’s so incredibly valuable and necessary, but you still have to have the page, the words, the time, the going over and over, the letting the poem go over and over you. Both are poetry.

I do not know poetry as well as I wish I did. I’m polygamous when it comes to genre. But the poetry I know and love best, the work I understand most deeply, has come to me doubly—these are the authors I’ve read in their entirety, all the poems, all their prose, interviews and essays about them and I’ve heard these poets read their work out loud. Sharon Olds, Van Jordan, Beth Ann Fennelly, Li-young Lee, W. S. Merwin, Barbara Hamby, Joel Byrd, Nancy Eimers, Kay Ryan. These are my stars, these are how I can steer. You need both, the page and the performance, the time to soak in and the alive energy, the presence of the poet.

When you read poetry, go slowly and let there be plenty of room for what comes to you to be noticed by you. Don’t go on a hunt. Don’t go too fast. If you don’t read poetry habitually, don’t overdo it right out of the gate, or you risk reinforcing the myth “Poetry is not for me.” It is for you. You are exactly who it is for. Go very slowly, as you do in love, making space for your experience as you engage with the other, and notice what you see and please tell me something of what you saw.

Poetry is the king.

Memoir is poetry in prose.

I am one of poetry’s hobbies.