I've been thinking about poetry lately. Some friends and I have started a very informal writing group, which has inspired me to start writing again, and much to my surprise, I've found myself writing poetry. I say "much to my surprise" because poetry is not something I've understood or appreciated over the years. But actually trying to do something of my own has given me much more respect for those who do it well.

Part of the reason I have not understood poetry is that I have never been sure how to approach it. You can't approach it the same way you approach a novel, or an essay, or any other kind of writing. You need a certain leisure to read poetry. You can't skim it, hastily looking for the main ideas or skipping over the dull bits to get to the good stuff. Poetry must be savored and enjoyed. You have to stop thinking of what you have to do next, or what you should be doing now, or what you've left undone during the day. You have to set all that aside to really appreciate anything, whether it be poetry, good food & wine, conversation, anything. But many things do yield some pleasure even if they're only slightly and hurriedly attended to. I can talk to friends on the phone while doing other things, but I know I enjoy it more and get more out of the conversation if I just sit down and put everything else away. A great meal will taste good even if it's eaten in five minutes, but how much better would it be if one really enjoyed it. Poetry, however, (at least, I've found) will not give up anything to a hurried, careless reader. She is quite demanding and will not speak unless she knows she has your undivided attention. And not just your attention, for that can be rushed and hurried too. She won't speak unless she has you, all of you, freely and truly wanting to spend time with her, for her own sake.

Language, emotion and discipline all meet in poetry, and one must have an understanding and a love of all those things to really approach it. It's that intersection of those very different things that makes poetry both hard to approach and hard to write but all the more amazing when it's done well. In my small attempts, I've found the editing of poetry to be quite difficult. It's hard to change one thing, a word or a line, without changing the feel and tone of the poem. It's like, as a friend pointed out, one of those picture-puzzles, where you have to slide tiles around to make a picture. Pictures have alot to do with poetry; the poet sees something in a certain way and then translates that vision into words, not a flat description, but through the careful selection of words, using their sound and rhythm, tries to make the reader see what they saw.

I'll end this hopefully-coherent post with some gems I've stumbled on lately. The first it by Yeats, and it's short enough to quote here:

When You Are Old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crown of stars.


The other is much too long to quote in its entirety here, and this link where you can find it comes courtesy of Peculiar. It's the Anglo-Saxon saga The Seafarer. It's long, but well worth it.

Not for him is the sound of the harp
nor the giving of rings
nor pleasure in woman
nor worldly glory --
nor anything at all
unless the tossing of waves;
but he always has a longing,
he who strives on the waves . . .


And now my spirit twists
out of my breast,
my spirit
out in the waterways,
over the whale's path
it soars widely
through all the corners of the world --
to me it comes back to me
eager and unsated;
the lone-flier screams,
urges onto the whale-road
the unresisting heart
across the waves of the sea.