How do you harness poetry in your life?

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Permalink Reply by Pat Coyle on July 19, 2008 at 10:47am

Many poems have spoken to me over the years, but this simple one finds its way into my concious mind most often. It confirms some things which I know in my heart: I can't make a wrong decision, and whichever fork I take... I've got nothing to fear, and everythng to gain by going my own way.

The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost, 1920

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 20

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Permalink Reply by Brandon Sobotka on July 19, 2008 at 11:42am

I love to read poetry, however I prefer to write it. I use it as stress relief amonst other things. There is a deep passion and a true feeling to poetry. It's an unspoken scripture from one's soul. It's a way to free your mind without the need of someone to listen.

I love to listen to others poetry instead of reading, because then you can hear it in it's original text. I love to have people explain their poetry...to me that is the most amazing part of it. You can always create what you feel, but when you hear someone else explain their own.....that is special.

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Permalink Reply by Pat Coyle on July 19, 2008 at 1:37pm

Why not share some of your work here??

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Permalink Reply by richard ramsey on July 20, 2008 at 4:16pm

Pat, a complete collection from Frost sits by my favorite chair in my house, the chair I most often choose to use as I watch TV. But I have it there to remind me that, at any moment, I can turn the TV off and find refreshment or wonderment or so many things that I am usually clicking through my TV hoping to find.

Poetry and so many poets speak to me. And, while I hope ones own creative spark to write isn't flickered out by its reading, I have to share one of my favorites (one of many).

I heard poet Billy Collins read this and I laughed so hard, realizing it's truth in my own life!

THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night --
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky --

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti --
to be perfectly honest for a moment --

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

Billy Collins, the U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, is the author of seven collections of poetry and is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He serves as the poet laureate of New York state.

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Permalink Reply by Lalita Amos on July 21, 2008 at 3:21am

I love classical Persian (or Sufi) mystical poetry with Nezami as a favorite. Nezami gave us the Layla of the famous song by Dereck and the Dominos, ("darling won't you ease my worried mind?") and was a tribute to the Sufi poem "Layla and Majnun (ليلى ومجنون)," an epic love story wherein a man goes mad when his great love is married off to another--being Sufi, it also contains a double meaning regarding the madness that those who love God can experience in their quest to be closer to God. Layla and Majnun was written in the 1100's in Iran.

This one is another of my favorites,

--------
'The Way of the Holy Ones' by Sanai, translated by Andrew Harvey and Eryk Hanut from the work, 'Perfume of the Desert'


Don't speak of your suffering -- He is speaking.
Don't look for Him everywhere -- He's looking for you.

An ant's foot touches a leaf, He senses it;
A pebble shifts in a streambed, He knows it.

If there's a worm hidden deep in a rock,
He'll know its body, tinier than an atom,

The sound of its praise, its secret ecstasy --
All this He knows by divine knowing.

He has given the tiniest worm its food;
He has opened to you the Way of the Holy Ones.
--------

What I love about this poem is that it tells me, beautifully, that I am not alone--not in my personal or professional dealings--and that the universe is fashioned to provide for me if I reach out for it.

There is poetry all around me most of the time, with the lyric poetry of songs playing on my Sirius radio, snippets of the Bagavad Gita, a poem to God and other works filling my office and home. Some are sung, others scribed in English and still more written in soaring calligraphy so beautiful that I have to remind myself that those swirls, jots and tittles are letters.

There is poetry in the name my mother gave me which, years later, softened the heart of an Indian doctor who had just pronounced my father's case "hopeless." Remembering the poems and hymns sung about the goddess, Lalita, she tried one more thing.

And saved him.

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Permalink Reply by Alex Maurer on July 21, 2008 at 10:57am

Old-fashioned I know, but my favorite poetry comes from the 19th century British Anthology, the Romantic and Victorian era. William Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lord Byron are my favorite Romantics. Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Tennyson are some of my favorite Victorians.

WILLIAM BLAKE
— The Little Black Boy http://www.everypoet.com/Archive/Poetry/william_blake/william_blake...
— The Chimney-Sweeper http://www.everypoet.com/Archive/Poetry/william_blake/william_blake...
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
— Goblin Market http://celtic.benderweb.net/cr/cr47.html
ROBERT BROWNING
— My Last Duchess http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-last-duchess/
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
— Strange fits of passion have I known http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww146.html
LORD BYRON
— By the Rivers of Babylon We Sat Down and Wept http://englishhistory.net/byron/poems/babylon.html
COLERIDGE
— Kubla Khan
http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Kubla_Khan.html

Spring semester 2008 of my sophomore year, I had professor Wayne Glausser. People talk about that “life-changing professor,” and he was it for me. He inspired my entire class, most amazingly myself into liking old classic poetry and literature of the British anthology. I changed my major from Psychology to English Writing and haven’t looked back since! These were some of the poems that inspired me most resulting in pages of notes and an A on both written exams and in the class. I hope that teachers like him are at every school and students everywhere can appreciate this writing.

Poetry is a release for many, including myself, and the poems I presented above have some of the most complex and underlying images, societal views/hierarchies, inequalities, and turmoil of society and the mind.

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Permalink Reply by richard ramsey on July 21, 2008 at 3:56pm

(.........) wow--very touching post

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Permalink Reply by Erik Deckers on July 21, 2008 at 11:22am

I only use poetry when I am writing a freelance speech. I don't use it very often, but check out Bartleby.org every day to see if there are any snippets I can use. I keep a small Moleskine cahier notebook to record snippets of poems, speeches, and quotes to pull from later.

Not a big fan of modern poetry, since most of it looks like someone took a regular piece of prose and set the page width at 2.5 inches.

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Permalink Reply by Stephen James on July 21, 2008 at 2:41pm

It's hard for me to finish reading a novel, much less a book of poetry. I enjoy modern poetry with enjambment and multiple meanings packed into a tight little package, similar to a Chinese puzzle box--you know, with the little gift inside. It's amazing how much wealth of knowledge (intuitive and experiential that is) is bound up in a few lines. Poetry is constructed from words, but a vision always comes from those words.

Like any art, it sharpens our experience–making our experience more significant. Just as a religious believer enlarges the meaning of an event beyond the material world, a poem extends the meaning of an event. Such “awareness of experience” is real to believers. I tend to hold the author's meaning sacred. Way too much work out there is therapeutic, too. Personal poetry has a place, and therapy isn't bad in context. Serious poetry needs to show some complexity in either form or function.

It may be a little too academic, but here are my aesthetics on poetry at my poetry website.

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Permalink Reply by Erik Deckers on July 21, 2008 at 4:04pm

If I had to pick a poet I read for the sake of the poetry, it would be Robert Bly. For those of you familiar with the men's movement, yes, THAT Robert Bly. He's one of my all-time favorites, and I own three of his books. In fact, when I was doing the Great Book Dump of 2004, I made sure to hang on to those three, despite my wife's admonition that I hadn't read them in a while.

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Permalink Reply by Kevin Pace on July 25, 2008 at 4:26pm

Pat, I agree with your statement, ... so... why is it that "poetry" is considered to be unmarketable, unsellable, and undoable by mainstream publishers? I believe it is the "American Idol" effect, ... where with so many who think they can, so few really can. Weeding out the truly talented poets is a monumental task. Consequently, we stick with the traditional (usually dead) poets that literary circles have discovered. I am glad to tell you that modern poetry (and the ryming stuff) is alive and well in Greenfield, Indiana. It has taken me a while to shift from being a Kelly Grad Corporate Accounting Manager to being a poet. However, the thrills and cheers you get from a really creative interactive spreadsheet that does amazing things, pails in comparison to the impact a great poem story makes. I am far from a poetry expert, but my wife and I have a thriving 3 year business based around poetry called WordsDoMatter (and of course, they do). I now just have to laugh when a would-be publisher says "poetry doesn't sell." I have a spreadsheet that proves otherwise. Here is a sample I thought you might like....

ON A BIG BILLBOARD SIGN

I was driving home late on the highway one night.
My thoughts turned to how to make everything right.
I was so overwhelmed and struggling to find,
a way out of being so completely behind.

The daily routine had taken its toll.
My schedule had somehow taken over control.
I’d lost all my passion, my hope, and my drive.
The dreams I once had were just barely alive.

Asking for help was never my way,
but with little choice left, I decided to pray.
Then an answer appeared, it was surely divine.
God wrote it down on a big billboard sign.

It wasn’t some brilliant marketing campaign.
It wasn’t some catchy poetic refrain.
Just two simple words and the message was sent.
“I’m Available” it read, I knew what it meant.

copyright @ Kevin Pace, WordsDoMatter.com

Perhaps a better question than how to "harness" poetry, is how not to "harness" it.
Inspiration comes in many ways and many forms, "harnessing" it could take away it's freedom (from a writer's perspective). Just a thought... thanks for the topic. -
Kevin (I love the site - just found it).
Our story is on the web, I promise you, you will be inspired if you take time to read it.

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