On Poetry

In a previous post, I wrote about a talk I attended on the poet Seamus Heaney. I attended the talk because I’ve always enjoyed poetry. One of my favorite books when I was a child was When We Were Very Young by A. A. Milne, a book of poetry by the author of the Winnie-the-Pooh series. My mother read these poems to me before I could read for myself. I liked them so much that when I took a public speaking class in high school and had to recite a poem by memory, I chose “Halfway Down” from When We Were Very Young. The poem describes a child sitting on a step halfway down a staircase, one of my favorite places to sit in my house when I was growing up.

When I graduated from middle school, my eighth grade language arts teacher gave everyone in her class a book that she thought we’d like. For me, she chose a collection of Emily Dickinson poetry. Somehow in high school and college I never took a class focused solely on poetry, although poetry was certainly part of the many literature classes I took as an English major in college. I can still remember Roy Starling, one of my professors at Rollins College, leading a class discussion of William Wordworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” in a course about the Romantic Period. This poem is well-known for the narrator’s description of daffodils along the edge of a lake and the way the memory of the flowers is able to provide some cheer later on.

Beautiful Daffodil Flowers. (Pexels/Chad Russell)

Because I focused on the field of rhetoric and composition in graduate school, I didn’t take any creative writing courses as a graduate student, and the few literature courses I took were theoretical rather than poetic. However, I did take a poetry writing class once through a non-credit, continuing education program that Brown University used to offer. The instructor, Nancy Donegan, was a poet who taught at Brown, and she gave assignments focused on strengthening attention to language and detail. I remember sometimes writing in the style of an assigned poet, or other times working from assigned first lines, or other times being assigned a set number of syllables to include in each line, or a set number of adjectives to include. I saved the poems my classmates wrote for that class, and I saved the poems I wrote, too. Here’s one of them:

Two stories up, behind a closed window

reflecting tree branches, lives a woman

alone, with white puffy hair,

a dry complaining voice, and legs not as limber

as once before. Each day she makes the few short steps

out of her blue-carpeted living room,

through the glass sliding door, and onto a brick

balcony adorned with arched pillars and iron-work railing.

There she used to grow geraniums

in hanging pots, but now she’d rather sit

in a rocking chair in the sun, watching leaves

fall off the alley tree—night approaching.

I don’t remember the inspiration for this poem, but given that I wrote it not long after living in Pittsburgh, PA, it was probably an attempt to describe a scene or a person I witnessed there. The woman in the poem reminds me of the woman who lived across the hall from me in the apartment building where I lived. I used to sometimes help her carry her groceries up the stairs to the third floor where our apartments were, and she had the white puffy hair, dry complaining voice, and legs not as limber as once before that I refer to in the poem. As I remember it, though, her apartment did not have a balcony, so perhaps this poem is a melding of memories.

I mentioned in a previous post that I’ve kept both academic and personal journals on and off throughout my life, and occasionally, poetry appears in the personal journals. Sometimes I find that words come in poetic, rather than prose, form. I'm not sure why, nor am I sure why at other times my writing is more matter-of-fact. I just take the words as they come, and when they don’t come at all, I wait until they do again. There are long stretches of time when my personal journal pages remain blank. Until recently, my personal journal endured a long stretch of blankness, but with the advent of this blog, my personal journal writing is now online instead. I think it will be interesting to see whether new poetry emerges in this medium.