Knowing that it’s World Poetry Day! Fortunately, my daily Magnetic Poems are NOT the standard by which poetry is judged. There are so many brilliant poets, living and dead, whose words give us insight into emotion, beauty, language, history–every facet of the human condition–not to mention the non-human condition.
Poetry can enlighten us, entertain us, inform us. It can make us laugh and cry. It can make us say, Yes! Someone understands. And sometimes, I never thought of it that way. With the greatest economy of language, it offers the entire universe from the smallest speck of matter to the grandest concept we can imagine. Poetry is precise and concrete and magical and evocative all at once. It is music to our ears, images for our eyes, and gives us smells and tastes and touches we remember or only imagined.
I’d like to name my favorite poem, but as soon as I think of one, a half dozen more come to mind. For as long as I was able to read, poetry was there. This is one of the earliest books I was ever given–just for me, all mine:
I still remember, to the word, the lines of poetry Mrs. Bryan had us memorize in high school. Poetry was the first of my writing I was brave enough to share with anyone. It bonded me to one of my mentors, my uncle, and became a dialogue between my dear friend Riley and me, and later Timothy F and me.
Poetry can be, for me, as good as meditation. If I can open a book of poems while sitting outside somewhere, that’s a slice of paradise. Currently, it’s going to be this one:
Sometimes, as in this case, I’m fortunate enough to know the poet. That makes discovering and savoring each poem even better. But really, when I read Yeats and Keats and Dickinson and Sexton and Coleridge and Auden and Millay and Frost and Plath and Browning and Bishop and Lowell and Shakespeare and Larkin and Thomas and Doty and Monette and Hopkins and Donne and–okay, okay, I’ll stop–I feel that I know them a little, too.
Their poems are old and beloved friends.
I can still remember the first poem I had to memorize for the 3rd grade
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail ….
It wasn’t till much later that I learned that it was by Lewis Carroll, that it was in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and that it was a parody of another poem. I don’t remember which one, just that it was about a prissy little somebody that wanted to be like a bee. I think Crocodile is much cooler and I have always loved it. I didn’t care for Mrs Burns my teacher very much, and I still don’t ( she really should have learned to say my name…) but I think she deserves a little thanks for introducing me to that poem because it’s led to a lot of others. I especially like modern Irish poets like Seamus Heaney. I could go on about what I like, but that would make for too long a note, but I always love Crocodile the most, perhaps because I loved it first
Since I am watching The Wolfman here’s another poem I know by heart
Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night
may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.
It’s short. Is it a poem, or just a cunning crafty sentence?