Poetry Meme

As promised...

The first poem I remember reading/hearing/reacting to is…
…maybe "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear. I say “maybe,” because I distinctly remember my father reading this one to me from a beautiful, big, illustrated copy we had and loving it, especially the way he read it. However, I also know that my mother and brother and I used to memorize poems as a pre-bedtime activity, and how I loved Robert Louis Stevenson’s "Bed in Summer" (one of the ones I memorized). I’m not sure which came first.

I was forced to memorize long Bible passages in school (I went to a Lutheran elementary school), and…
… I’m sure some of them were very poetic, but I couldn’t begin to tell you which ones they were, and they obviously didn’t stick. I’m not even sure if they were really all that long, but to a fourth-grader, they seemed interminably so. Talk about a useless activity, one I can remember hurrying through, because I so hated it. In high school, we memorized the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, and that I loved and can still recite (although I’m sure my pronunciation is all wrong).

I read poetry because…
…I’m always so amazed by how brilliant poets are, able to convey images and stories in so few words. I have to admit, though, that for a very, very long time, I didn’t read poetry. The way it was taught in high school and college completely turned me off, and also, it’s such an extremely personal and emotional form of writing that the reader really, really needs to discover poets on her own. Being forced to read and analyze Ezra Pound when you aren’t feeling any connection to him whatsoever is far worse than reading some novel you find boring.

A poem I am likely to think about when asked for a favorite poem is…
…"The Owl and the Pussycat." I still absolutely love that poem.

I don’t write poetry, but…
...I wish I could. I’m nowhere near brilliant enough to convey images and stories in so few words. When it comes to writing, I lean more in the direction of Tolstoy (who if he were writing today, people would say, as they do about Stephen King and Pat Conroy, “He needs a good editor”).

My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature…
…because I’m much more picky about poetry. When it comes to other types of literature, I’ll read almost any writer and will put in time and effort if I’m not immediately impressed. When it comes to poetry, either the poet grabs me immediately with the first few poems, and I keep reading, or not, in which case I’ll readily abandon it.

I find poetry…
…to be awe-inspiring when I connect with it and tedious when I don’t.

The last time I heard poetry…
…was in the summer of 2005. Our company was having a multiple-day, off-site sales meeting (a curious invention of the publishing industry in which editors pitch their books to those who will be selling them), and one evening we had a dinner activity. I’m not much of a joiner, and when I found out we had invited an author who’d written a book for us on incorporating poetry slams into the high school classroom to lead a poetry slam, I was less than thrilled. Since you now know how I feel about poetry (that it’s very personal and not something I particularly want to share with a large group), I’m sure you can understand why.

For not the first time in my life, I was completely wrong. We had “reciters” and “judges.” I was a judge (imagine having to judge both your boss and the company president, who were reciters). The reciters were given poems to read and the judges had to vote. It turned out to be one of the most hilarious and fun dinners I’ve attended in years, whose highlight was a recitation of a teenager’s poem on pain that was brilliantly performed by another one of our author’s sons (it helped that he’s in the theater).

I think poetry is like…
…beautiful mathematical equations that succinctly bring one to life’s truths through letters rather than through numbers.

I'm tagging Dante for this one.