This is for the poems that stand defiant on the other side of the fence from you.
This is for the poems certain that they have escaped my grasp because my arms are left dangling, and I am too tired to understand them.
This is for the poems certain that they have escaped my grasp because my arms are left dangling, and I am too tired to understand them.
This is for the poems that read me better than I read them in the stillness of my half-hearted defiance against the ordinary. The poems content to watch me struggle in my third or fourth reading where I begin to read out loud in a slower way of speaking with the hopes of uncovering the meaning in the page.
I believe that some poems are purposed to hurt our pride.
They are bruising things to the simple notions of our thinking ourselves wise or right or people with understanding. Poetry tears down our defenses revealing layers of interpretation. In our desperation and as our thoughts continue in the battle, we know - this could take all night.
One after another they cling to me, and words dug deep into the crevices of my mind. ...what does this mean? To me.
I can hear them even now, their echoes.
“so, through me, freedom and the sea”...
“He had cancer stenciled into his face”...
"Something there is that doesn’t love a wall" ...
"Out on the flats, a heron still as a hieroglyph carved
"Something there is that doesn’t love a wall" ...
"Out on the flats, a heron still as a hieroglyph carved
carved on the soft gray face of morning.” ...
That’s Pablo Neruda meeting Edward Hirsch meeting Robert Frost meeting Leonard Nathan.
When a poem is a graph, I can map its meaning - untidy its grammar.
Poetry found in the midst of thoughts of images like letters in a shoe box or an empty box next to an open flame, lines of madness and rhythm starved of truth but full of signaling and scattered plots and I think they awaken a poet in me. A mess of structure, words on paper.
What about the poems that wound my pride until it sits meekly in the corner, finally, aware that there are a million acres of understanding between me and the poem, me and the poet. Then those acres in an instant can become not distant at all.
What about the poems that wound my pride until it sits meekly in the corner, finally, aware that there are a million acres of understanding between me and the poem, me and the poet. Then those acres in an instant can become not distant at all.
This is for the poems that tempt me to thinking 'maybe I don't enjoy poetry'...
Those same poems preach in my worried heart that I wanted to keep my mind. And then I fall victim to believing that they are the poems that will uncage me.
They are the poems that drench my ego.
They are the poems that drench my ego.
