How did you first engage with poetry?
Three things sealed my commitment to (obsession with) poetry:
1. Listening to my father read Victorian novels to me when I was a child. I often did not understand the content of the novels, but he was a very fluent reader and I absorbed the beauty of language and rhythm from him.
2. Being taught in Sunday School that “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made flesh,” which seemed both continuous with my experience of being read to and utterly, transformatively mystical. The divine in language, language in flesh/enfleshed. Wow.
3. My mother gave me a book of Emily Dickinson poems when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. I still have it. The poems did everything I needed language to do: feel, speculate about the nature of the world, offer a compelling way of thinking that wasn’t indebted to conventional narrative structure.
No comments:
Post a Comment