rereading poetry

In my offtime between quarters of school, I've returned to one of my first loves: poetry. First I picked up Paradise Lost, which I had been meaning to reread for a few years. Then I picked up my old Norton Anthology and started paging through, rereading the poems I'd seen many times before, glancing through new ones, just enjoying the experience. A well-crafted, beautiful, and incisive line seems to me the pinnacle of magic, transformation. I used to leave such lines everywhere that I might read them, or repeat them over and over in my head.

Poetry used to be a harder slog for me, though I've always maintained a relationship with it. Each line, each word seemed so dense and carefully chosen, that I wanted to give my deep, undivided attention to the piece and understand it thoroughly before moving to the next. Which is part of the reason why most long poems (many of Pope's, for example) cause me to glaze over and simply move to the next. The effort of such deep understanding precludes pleasure, at times, rather than enhancing.

In college I took a course with a professor who taught us to see poetry first as music, and to take our initial readings as an opportunity to enjoy the sounds and rhythm. Then, with repeated readings, the deeper layers of meaning may be easier to unfold. That lesson has been liberatory for me, especially now as I live and work outside of a literary culture that would make me want to be able to cite authors verbatim at will.

Which reconnects me with the power of poetry that always calls me back.