What I Learned from Reading Poetry
In the first semester of my MFA program, my mentor suggested that I read poetry because it would help me see the quintessential use of language. So I read poetry but I didn’t get it and I felt like a fraud. Other writers get poetry, after all, so I must not be a real writer. Or I didn’t have the right education. Or my brain was too old.
I had a book of Emily Dickinson‘s poems already on my shelf. I started with Success is Counted Sweetest. It’s an old favorite that’s spoken to me in the past but the words stuck together and formed a knot my chest. I thought maybe it’s because Dickinson’s work is traditional poetry. The rhyming kind of thing you learn about in grade school.
I had a chapbook written by Steve Langan, a friend and mentor. Some of his work is humorous like the line some people are so ugly when they’re sleeping you want to take their temperature from Ugly Kids. It made me smile but still, the point of reading poetry escaped me.
I found Ted Kooser, a Pulitzer Prize winner, U.S. Poet Laureate, and famous Nebraskan. I thought I was starting to get the point. In the poem The Woman Whose Husband Was Dying, the last two lines and then she stepped outside, and placed one foot and then the other on the future, and it held her up, resonated. I could see the imagery. I could see, not just in my mind’s eye but with something more, some inner sense of understanding. Still, I wasn’t sure if that was the point.
Because persistence is my middle name, I kept at it. One poem every day, like a prescription, thinking maybe it would take several days or a few weeks to achieve the necessary therapeutic level. But no change. Then one day I read a poem out loud.
Light bulb moment.
Poetry needs to be spoken. It needs to sit in the mouth and let the tongue feel the shape of it. Soft or hard, sweet or sour. It needs to jump from the lips and land on the ears because the sound of the words gives them substance.
I bought Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook that’s a primer on the use of using vowels and consonants to create sound, using the emphasis of syllables to create rhythm, and so on. Reading it reminded me of a fellow classmate, a poet, talking about how she spent an hour working to get just the right word. At the time I was puzzled but now I understand. The quintessential use of language through sound and rhythm.