Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that poetry is "what will
and must be spoken."
April is National Poetry Month, and I celebrate by hosting community
poetry events and revisiting poetry in my writing classes.
Edward Hirsch, poetry editor of DoubleTake magazine and
author of four volumes of poetry, including "Wild Gratitude" and "Earthly
Measures," has some of my favorite thoughts about poetry:
"Read a poem to yourself in the middle of the night.
Turn on a single lamp and read it while you're alone in an otherwise dark room
or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read it when you're wide awake in the
early morning, fully alert. Say it over to yourself in a place where silence
reigns and the din of the culture—the constant buzzing noise that surrounds
us—has momentarily stopped. This poem has come from a great distance to find
you."
Reading a poem is an intimate and solitary experience that
should be treasured. Once a poem is
understood, it evolves to live inside the reader. Reading a poem demands we pay
attention and concentrate in an era when we're inattentive and distracted by
the busyness of our days. As Hirsh suggests, "poetry is a solitary,
intimate and passionately private communication of a soul to another
soul."
When I taught middle school, I told my fourteen-year-old boy
students that the best way to get a girl's attention was to read her a poem;
better yet, write her one. These boys did, and so did the girls, and we formed the Society of Poets. We read poems in a coffeehouse setting in the classroom on Fridays. The weekly event brought appreciation for each other as well as sighs and tears and even the local press. To belong to
this elite group, students had to write 100 poems. Thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen-year-old kids dug deep
to find ways to express what had before been inexpressible, feelings about
love, insecurity, depression, fear, and war.
As Hirsch said, "The great individual poem is
the message salvaged from a shipwreck and sealed in the bottle. Take the time to
go down to the dunes and search for that bottle. When you find it, bring it home
because it is now yours. This haunted and haunting message was meant for you."
Celebrate National Poetry Month! Join us Thursday, April
16th from 1-3 at Sea Country Center in Laguna Niguel, 949-425-5151, and hear five of my
favorite performance poets: John Gardiner, Ricki Mandeville, Michael Sprake,
Ellyn Maybe, and Kate Buckley. They will increase your appreciation of the spoken word.
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