When I asked S to write a guest post, he readily agreed. He told me he wanted to write a public love letter to me. Boring, I told him. If you want to break up with me in public, now that would make for interesting reading, but a piece on “how do I love you, let me count the ways”? Yawn. I asked him to write about life as someone who is married to a person with CF. Boring, he told me: it is what it is and there’s not much to say. While I admire and appreciate his certainty that CF has little impact on our relationship and the evolution of our love, I think it’s a worthy topic that may be of interest to people who have CF, to parents of children with CF, or to people who are currently in a relationship with someone who has CF. Perhaps S will be willing to venture into the murky depths of CF and his feelings about it for a future blog post. For now, the winning topic is… poetry. Poetry always wins; do you remember a time without someone writing it and someone else complaining about it? Along with cockroaches, poetry will survive the end of the world.
Please welcome my tall, dark, and handsome S who after writing this guest post is now tall, dark, handsome, and poetically inclined.
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When Lizi invited me to write a guest blog, I was honored and excited. But also, if I’m honest, nervous. What could I, a neophyte to poetry, add to the dialogue?
I considered commenting on the Slate article that found poetry in the official descriptions of dog breeds.
I considered song lyrics such as The Police’s “Message in a Bottle” (Walked out this morning, don’t believe what I saw/Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore/Seems I’m not alone in being alone/Hundred billion castaways, looking for a home) or the lyrics at the end of “Eclipse,” a song in what is often considered the greatest rock album of all time, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon: And everything under the sun is in tune/But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.
I also recalled my teachers who told us of the debate between those who think poetry can and should be read without any knowledge of the poet or time in which she wrote, and those who think poetry can only be fully understood with the proper historical, cultural and political context. Which reminded me of another scholarly debate about whether text is alive, a breathing animal, or a petrified relic of times past. All heady topics ripe for dialogue.
But it was a discussion at work of all places that answered my question. A colleague of mine ended several emails in an email chain with one or two line aphorisms, whose authors he considered “poets,” and not just any poets, but “famous” ones. He took umbrage when I questioned whether the quotations met the test for poetry. I may have offended him when I said the lines he chose belonged inside fortune cookies. I told him that what I considered poetry, by contrast, was a piece recited by Billy Collins at the recent poetry reading Lizi and I attended.
I thought back to something Billy Collins mentioned: kids invited to hear poetry as part of his “Poetry 180” program often scoffed and squirmed at the concept of poetry until they heard a poem that resonated with them. Then they felt conflicted by their visceral reaction to the word “poetry” (with its connotation of sonnets and stanzas and Emily Dickinson and Keats) and their enjoyment of the powerful words they just heard. And it occurred to me: the reason I didn’t like poetry before, or thought I didn’t, was that I didn’t understand what poetry actually was.
It would be presumptuous for me try to define poetry, and anyway I wouldn’t know where to start. For me, poetry has an emotional content that transcends the fonts on the page or the pixels on the computer screen. Sometimes it’s humorous and maybe serious and serene and mournful and bittersweet, or all of those. And sometimes, it is set to music. But the commonality is that hearing a poem, in whatever form, always challenges me. Sometimes the challenge is to unwrap its lyrical knot. On other occasions, it’s about holding still, not resisting, and letting the torrid currents wash through me.
I have Lizi to thank for patiently leading me into its shallow water and helping me to gradually immerse myself in the pool of poetry. I now see that poetry is not an exotic forest but more like the air we breathe and the water we drink, the collections of words and feelings that come spilling out from people every day, whether they have PhDs or MFAs and conduct poetry readings, or write inspirational cards, dog breed guidelines, or stuff fortune cookies. The truest test of a great poem has nothing to do with who wrote it, or its length, or the sophistication of its vocabulary. It’s about whether, upon reading or hearing it, one’s view of the world will never be quite the same.
Have you encountered any poetry lately in unconventional forms?
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S loved the experience of hearing Billy Collins read his poetry. That experience, more than anything else I’ve ever discussed or shared with S, warmed him up to poetry. Today’s poem is in honor of S and anyone who is willing to give poetry a try. (click link to read entire poem)
Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light…
