What Poetry Does

Over the past several days, I have had occasion to read more poetry than one can safely ingest.   My brother started it.  He sent me a link to a poetry reading by a certain poet on YouTube.   No sooner had I watched it (and a slew of others linked to it, even a poetry slam--no, you don't want to know...), and I found myself at a bookstore.  There, I bought two collections of the poet's work, allegedly because, on reading a few selections from each, "I couldn't decide which one to buy."  Hah! 

It gets worse, I showed it all to one of my best friends.  Next I decided to make my next speech a poetry reading.  This meant I had to breeze through both collections and select a group of them for the reading.  As part of this project, I decided I had to create a narrative to sew them all together for the reading.  I vacillated among a handful of choices to include in the reading, drafted three versions and finally edited it down so I could make the eight-minute limit I was given for the reading.  The four selected poems became like pets, your little friends that follow you around in your head.     

Well, once you get that committed, you wind up reading them aloud, getting to know the little buggers, where they speak softly, where you must pause to get it right, where your own speech must keep pace with the rapid fire cadence of their stories.  It becomes all about you then.  It's how this piece or that one strikes you and invades your thoughts.  

So, here I am.  Sitting with the finished product, knowing I have to read it with just the right touch to convey these pieces in the way they have affected me.  So, what do I have to do?  I have to read them aloud, again and again.  I know I read the entire piece with its four poems out loud at least twenty times.  Six or more times as I was making the final selections, editing in this piece or that.  Nine the night before and five the morning I presented.

When it was over, I thought it would go away.  The next morning I awoke from a long dream-filled sleep, full of images that had nothing to do with the poetry I had spent so much time with.  There were soccer games morphing into rugby games, long falls resulting in only miraculously minor injuries, missed rides, long walks, strangers encountered, making connections with me for no apparent reason—you know, dreams.  I am not a regular dreamer.  It is rare that I arise with a recollection of even a fragment of a dream, much less a whole collection.  I think it’s related to the poetry overload. 

Billy Collins, the former Poet Laureate of the United States, says that the trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry, like guppies in the feeding tank, more bunnies spilled from the mother rabbit onto the lawn   He goes on to say that poetry will encourage you to break into the poems of others with a flashlight and a ski mask to steal their phrases.  He's right.  It happened to me as part of this poetry hangover.  I scratched this one out last night--

My ear longs to hear
the hum of your velvet voice
absent now for days.

I shamelessly stole the hum of your velvet voice from Walt Whitman.  This is the second poem I found myself writing, but I think I have it under control, thank heaven.  But be careful out there.