Introduction to Poetry (Journaling)

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.

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