ON THE IMPORTANCE OF POETRY
(Posted 2007-02-12 14:13:54 by Ray Lopez)
Read good poems. If you really want to get away from the ugliness that
life is, read some good poems.
This is a lesson that I've recently learned. I am one of those people who
have always had trouble understanding poems, or even seeing the point of
writing and reading poetry. To me, poetry involved some set of skills and
abilities that other people had. These other people were less important,
to me, than folks who did really important things like science and
engineering. For the most part, I ignored poetry and poets because I did
not think that anything from that world concerned me and my life.
Boy, was I wrong. I have been reading a lot of poetry lately, in a simple
attempt to improve myself. And one of the things I've learned is that
poetry matters, a lot. It matters because it opens us up to a world that
is full of images of beauty, of love. Poems make you think about your true
values, of those concepts and things that really matter in your life. When
you find a poem that you like, it resonates with you because it hits at
some underlying value that you have, and makes you instantly aware of how
your values shape who you are. Do that again and again, and you connect
with a part of yourself that has always been there, but that you've
ignored. Once you "see" that part of yourself, it may make you happy, or
depressed, or angry, or confused. But it's a part of yourself that you
need to get to know, if only so that you'll be able to understand how it
affects you as a person.
So don't be shy, pick up some good poems and get to reading them. You
won't understand them all, but some of them may resonate with you in ways
you did not expect. I know that I have been very pleasantly surprised.
Here is a list of what I have been told are "good" poets to start with:
* Alan Ginsburg
* Yeats
* Octavio Paz
* Robert Frost
* T.S. Eliot
* Pablo Neruda
* William Blake
* Rainer M. Rilke
* Billy Collins
* Gerard Manley Hopkins
* Adrienne Rich
* Sharon Olds
* Leonard Cohen
* Robert Burns
* Anne Sexton
If you need a jumpstart, pick up a copy of Garrison Keillor's book _Good
Poems_. There you will find a large selection of poems that are not only
good but easy to read and think about.
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