In the Context of the Whole: Letting Yourself Like Poetry

I've just spent my morning in a sunlit sunroom--faithful dog at my feet, faithful coffee in my hand--reading aloud Modern American poetry, which is my favorite sort, though I have read extensively of the premodern variety as well as far too many Irish kinds.

There is something very spiritually clarifying in reading poetry aloud (the right poetry, that is) because it gets to a certain moment when you realize "THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I MEAN!", and there, on the page, someone has captured it exactly.

And then there are other times, like in life, that you don't understand the meaning (or any meaning) of a poem at all, and that's okay. So long as you can concede that the poem has intrinsic beauty and greatness in simply existing, you don't need to understand it.

On that note, there is never a point at which a poem can be fully known, not even by the poet him or herself. The meaning constantly shifts from person to person, no two people having the same poetic experience or interpretation.

Some find that aggravating beyond all reason and, thus, refuse to like poetry. But is that not the glory of poetry? That it can communicate afresh with every read?

Why can we not just "press [our] ear against [a poem's] hive"? Why is it that all we "want to do/is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it"?

We want to know the "real meaning" because that nebulous in-between place is uncomfortable and doesn't fit with our box-set comprehension levels.

It doesn't fit with what we believe our world to be.

But our lives aren't like math equations. Our lives are like poems.

Sometimes the stanzas make absolute sense to us, and we want to read them aloud to anybody who will sit down long enough to listen to us.

And yet, other times, we get boggered down in the line breaks and slant rhymes and "what does that word even mean in this context?!" and can't for the life of us riddle the answer out.

Yet later in life, we may just wonder how we ever didn't see the meaning in those heroic couplets.

Let today begin a new tributary in your creative wanderlusts. Sit down, strip off your expectations, and simply listen to the stories and structures of Billy Collins and Marianne Moore and Allen Ginsberg and so many others with something to say.

Start today in somebody else's mind, and maybe you might find your own.