Poetry

I have to admit that I've never really been into poetry. I love to read, and find novels, mysteries, historical fiction and history to be all fascinating to read. But poetry has never been my strong suit. Maybe it's because I don't like the line being short and having to go to the next line, rather than it being just a long sentence or paragraph. Or maybe it's because I don't understand the deeper meaning. I don't know why, really. But poetry has always been that distant untouchable subject. 

But something recently began to change that. 

I was listening to the lyrics of the Dan Fogelberg Song "Leader of the Band", and one line in particular from his lyrics stuck out to me: 

"He earned his love through discipline, a thundering velvet hand.

His gentle means of sculpting souls took me years to understand."

What struck me so much in that line was this word painting - this juxtaposition of two words that have opposite meanings: "...thundering velvet..."

And it reminded me of the Welsh author and poet Dylan Thomas, who loved to use incongruous words placed together to elicit from the reader a specific image or feeling. In his short story "A Child's Christmas in Wales", Thomas uses these effectively to describe the sleeping uncles in the parlor after Christmas dinner, "The Uncles, breathing like dolphins." Or another passage "Eskimo-footed marksman" describing his adventures hunting the local cats with snowballs in the Christmas day Welsh snow with his best friend. 

And so I decided to take a detour into poetry, specifically starting with Thomas' poetry. But the question I had was "how to start?" With apologies to my high school English teachers Mr. Heyelmun and Mr. Neidhardt, I never really paid attention in class when we were discussing poetry (or anything for that matter). And I don't feel like Googling "How to read poetry" or find a YouTube video that will help.

But this week, I came up with an approach that I think will be successful. And it hinges on the fact that one cannot truly get the meaning of a poem with the first reading: it takes multiple readings to get the meaning (assuming you ever do get the meaning) of a poem. 

And I realized that is just like music. As a singer, we often do an initial sight-reading of a piece of music. Sometimes it sounds good at the first read, but most of the time we know there's work to be done. Then we start a process: work on a few measures at a time; work with different voice parts alone and then in specific combinations; start at the end and work backwards, measures at a time.

And I thought that to understand Thomas' poetry, I need to take a similar approach. 

Read the poem.

Read the poem again out loud.

Read a line multiple times, out loud, and change the timing, the rhythm, slow it down, use open vowels, clear diction.

Walk while reading. Sitting still means a dead read. Stand. Walk. Move. Let the poem breathe and have life.

Now, I haven't started the book yet, but now, with this understanding of how I am going to read his poems, I'm ready to start.