Debbie in LA left me this comment on this weeks Poetry Journal Monthly prompt post.
As a retired English teacher, I can attest that "poetry" is a hated subject in most classes. Adults have "analyzed" all the fun out of reading and writing it. I love free verse and any writing that does not follow a stiff pattern. It sometimes takes years for young people to learn a new love for poetry. Your type of blog has been needed for a long time. I hope many people discover it and share your/our joy.
*thanks Debbie*
It reminded me of my Fav Billy Collins poem that I copied into a journal many moons ago in a retreat with Paulus Berenshon.
Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
When I went back to it in the journal it was just purple text on a white page.
Shout out to Marlene who gave me these lovely texture stamps, and reading and enjoying the poem anew, I colored, painted stamped and spritzed.
The facing page is part of a poem, from Marianne Moore,
Stenciled, watercolor washed, stamped Italic Caps by Quietfire Design.
Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
Please join me and share your pages with Mr Linky here.
Comments and Question welcomed, and leave a comment here to be entered in the prize drawing for a Quietfire Design Stamp.
