April is National Poetry Month

            I love poetry. I think of poems as finely crafted short stories. Poetry makes me marvel at our ability to create a descriptive phrase in order to convey the beauty of the cosmos or the simplest flutter of a leaf on a tree branch in a breeze.  It is one of the greatest gifts human beings possess. Great poetry can make you cry or smile or take you back to a time in your memory when the world was fresh.

            I know a lot of people, grown people, have a hard time with poetry. They find it dull or difficult to understand. That makes me sad. There’s beauty in words and it’s disappointing to know that some people think poetry is something they have to deal with in school but once they graduate they never have to see it again. That’s so unfortunate. I think intelligent people, feeling people, should always be in love with words. Not every emotion can be expressed with a bouquet of roses on Valentine’s Day or a playful slap on the butt. Sometimes telling a woman that the beating of her loving heart is the metronome by which the music of passion is measured; or something of the like, can carry more weight than a vase of flowers on her desk at her job.

            As much as I love words and poetry, I find that I’m not a big fan of other poets. I’ve had a few moments in my life where I’ve gone to poetry slams and readings and performances of poetry. These poets seem to turn their poems into performance pieces or some kind of performance art thing that gets away from the words and the meat of what I consider good poetry. I want the words of a poem to lift me out of my chair as I imagine the dizzying heights I can be carried to. I don’t want to see a poet take her shirt off and point to what she’s written on her exposed breasts. (I think it was Tomato and Whore). And then just walk off the stage amid the un-phased beatniks to the sounds of snapping fingers.

            That’s a different kind of Art to me. It is self expression and I have no qualms with it. I just don’t think it necessarily should be called, “Poetry”. I think simply hearing a poet read the words they have written, in the cadence in which they imagined the rhythm, the flow, of the poem suggests has the ability to transport the imaginer to someplace wonderful or terrifying.

            I remember my early exposure to poetry. I believe it was the simple rhyming of Mother Goose and Fairy Tales. Shel Silverstein was a favorite of mine as a youth. His use of the pause and of the true power a word could carry was very forming. I still have a few memorized to this day. When I was a teenager I liked Edgar Allen Poe for his dark and melancholy fascinations but I could always tell there was some kind of love lying under his bleakness. I got into Kerouac and Bukowski and the Beats and wandered into a world that strayed from the formed and regimented poems of textbooks and into a new and captivating use of the written word. I discovered that a great book of poems, a bottle of red wine (or two) could lead to great literary insight. And a hell of a hang over.

            A great poem is one that can tease your memory and make you remember that once, you felt that way too. Prose or a fictional story has a way of guiding your imagination through the various corridors of imagination. But with poetry, the words are merely sign markers, which your imagination can choose to follow or not as you weave your way around. How you arrive at the end is up to where your mind took you. Unlike prose which usually has things wrapped in a bow followed by the words in heavy black ink, “THE END”.  A poem can go on without end in your imagination and can stick to the ribs of your mind long after you read or heard it.

            It happens to me quite often. I may not quote some famous poet in my mind, but I can recognize the inherent beauty a piece of paper wafting in the breeze may hold, and I want to express what I saw to others in a way they can feel what I felt. Not just visualize it, but feel it. As if they were standing right next to me as that moment the wind started to twirl the paper about the sidewalk and our breath was taken away.

            I want the woman of my affection to feel the depths of my passion for them, I want the world to know that I see it smile, I heard the joke, I felt the sun on my face, the wind in my hair, the mud on my feet, the blood in my veins, the lust of a hot kiss, the electric tingling of nerves; I want to express it all.

            Poetry is that vehicle. I can't wait for the next one.