Why I like - and dislike - Poetry

When I was in school, poetry was part of the English syllabus. Not the writing of it, but the reading. I hated it.

Teachers, pressed for time and in a hurry to finish the syllabus before the exams, forced us to learn the poems by rote, the more creative among them finding film songs that had the same meter and making us sing the poems to those tunes. It worked as a device to get us to remember the poems but did not instil in us any appreciation of the writing or of the poet.

Yet, some poems remained etched in my emotive memory, to surface decades later when I began reading audio pieces for my blog. Lord Ullin’s Daughter and Jabberwocky virtually caught me by the short and curlies... and forced me to read them the way I wanted to, not the way I’d been taught. The chills I knew were lurking in Lord Ullin’s Daughter surfaced.

Having always been interested in performing, I wondered why I wanted to perform certain poems and not others. Why, for instance, did I somehow feel that most modern rhyming poetry was not a patch on the "oldies", yet some modern free verse brought that same feeling of wonder and desire to perform that older, rhyming poetry did?

And then I discovered "Performing Literature" by Beverly Whitaker Long and Mary Frances Hopkins. I found it in a second-hand bookshop, heavily marked down from its original price, and I bought it because it was cheap and had the word "Performing" in its title. Little did I know what a treasure trove I had stumbled upon.

I found brilliant quotes on poetry, for example, Philip Wheelwright’s "As in nature new qualities may be engendered by the coming together of elements in new ways, so too in poetry new suggestions of meaning can be engendered by the juxtaposition of previously unjoined words and images."

I found explanations of meter and how my instinctive use of them in organic, rather than mechanical, modes brought out the meaning and emotions they carried. I discovered that the modern, free verse poems I instinctively liked were the ones that juxtaposed words and images in new ways, the way Wheelwright mentioned. They were also the ones that did use meter, but so subtly, that the reader was not even aware of the underlying meter in seemingly strangely broken lines.

I understood why a poet on a playwrights' forum was so enamoured of the "cadence" of my monologue, "The Matchmaker". And I understood Aristotle's use of the word "poetry" for dramatic text.

Isn't it wonderful to discover an intellectual explanation for an instinctive reaction?