Books and poetry help us share thoughts and emotions, touching our lives
Perhaps it’s the librarian in me or maybe just the lover of reading, but books—almost all kinds of books—can make my mind ramble as it absorbs new information from them and makes connections with the old.
There is a bit of a book-club mentality at work for me, because I find that sharing about what I read helps create a common understanding and continuity.
My mother always liked to find a book or two among her Christmas presents and start reading one of them the day after Christmas as a way of slowing down after Christmas season activities.
She read widely and appreciatively. After she had enjoyed David McCullough’s biography of President Harry Truman, she learned that all his books were still in print, and she made reading them a joyful project.
The rest of us learned a great deal of miscellaneous information about the Johnstown Flood and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal.
Bright fall days often remind me of “October’s Bright Blue Weather,” one of her favorite poems.
Rita Dove is a prize-winning poet and former Poet Laureate of the United States. After hearing an interview with her about her editing of The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, I informed my husband that it should be my Christmas present. Since then, I have been dipping into it frequently, sometimes intentionally and sometimes at random.
As seems usual, when I shift my attention to a subject, I see it everywhere.
Certainly, the Gospel of John, with its extended metaphors, encourages us to read it as poetry no matter how it is laid out on the page.
Poetry can often give us new or deeper slants on subjects both great and small, and even poetry itself.
Billy Collins, an award-winning poet and former Poet Laureate, often has a slightly skewed approach to his topics.
He presents “Introduction to Poetry” as if he had been teaching a class. He encouraged students to “waterski across the surface of a poem,” but they persisted in a sort of enhanced interrogation, “beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.”
Maybe we’ve been doing that to the parables of Jesus.
Poet Willis Barnstone, who will present the Roger Williams lectures on March 23 and 24 in Pullman, believes that the parables of Jesus were most likely delivered as poems.
That could be one reason they were remembered in Jesus’ time.
Clearly the disciples were not carrying notebooks and ballpoint pens as they followed Jesus around Galilee.
Theirs was a primarily oral culture with a literacy rate in the low single digits.
Poetry, chant and song all create a rhythm and simplify remembering long passages or lists of facts.
Translating poetry is notoriously difficult, and as the parables made their way from Aramaic to Greek to Latin and then to modern languages, Willis believes that they lost their poetic form. The typesetters won.
Reading the parables as poetry, or chanting or singing them, could widen and deepen them for us.
Indeed, we might even find that we remember more of the details if we do that.
Poetry and music have a way of burrowing into the remotest reaches of our thoughts and emotions, touching every corner of our lives.
Dipping into the Penguin Anthology has revealed cries of anguish over the waste of war, as well as both serious and lighthearted reflections on the human condition, the conundrums of how we live together and how we deal with our solitariness, and our participation in the poetry that is Creation, including October’s bright blue weather.
As I prepare to move, I have been sorting through books and the memories they stir.
Nancy Minard - Editorial Team
Copyright © March 2012 - The Fig Tree