Encountering Poetry (original publication: 9/10/2020)

 Outside of music, I don’t regularly consume poetry. 

For me, as I’m sure for many, it started with Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky and the like. I would wake up hours before school just to run to my desk and write poems for a while. I was in elementary school, so I don’t really think I was baring my soul on those pages or anything, but certainly I was falling fast in love with the fun you can have even playing with things as simple as formatting, spelling, grammar, syntax, etc. 

It wasn’t until Walt Whitman and Robert Frost later in middle school and high school that I really began realizing what poetry is, or perhaps what it is considered by the academic world. I was astounded how I could be moved far more by a few stanzas than I’d been by entire books or even entire series. It wasn’t just that they knew the right words to write or the best words to write; they chose the only words they could’ve told that story with. That class of economy in writing practically haunts me. 

Then high school to now I’ve gotten far more interested in epic poems, Homer, Shakespeare, and the like. Homer’s words sounded like they were written by the Greek gods themselves and the fact that Shakespeare could write such beautiful poetry that characters are meant to deliver (not for audiences to read)---it’ll never not confuse or bemuse me.

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