I talk about poetry with people quite often when I am out in public. When I ask if they enjoy it, some answer an enthusiastic Yes! But many folks admit they don’t get it. It’s English, yes, but what is it saying, exactly?

I sympathize. Poetry is a different language than prose. A poem doesn’t scan like a crime novel or a recipe for quinoa salad.

In other cultures, poetry is often more a part of every child’s education. In the Middle East, the poems of Rumi and Hafiz are broadcast from loudspeakers. Chinese school-kids learn the work of the Masters, the great poets of past dynasties; some even learn to recite entire poems by heart. The Irish call Dublin “The City of Literature”.

But in our country, poetry (as well as most of the arts) tends to take a back seat to sports, business, and auto repair. Worse, the subject is often taught the same way as science or math: reduce a poem to its essential meaning, dissect it to discover what gives it life.

What’s the meaning of a sunset? What objective truth is revealed in climbing a mountain, sitting quietly on the banks of a slow river, or wading through a sea of wheatgrass on the open plains? Can you quantify and categorize the ocean?

Poetry is an expression of the soul. It is a space where the heart can speak, then read aloud what it has spoken to itself. To view a poem as a linear, left-brain creation is to entirely miss the point. Billy Collins has a hilarious take on this in his Introduction to Poetry. Sometimes dropping a mouse into a poem is the way to go.

So I’ll try to shine some light on the subject by sharing a few poems that have served to change the course of my life.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver is a joy from start to finish. It wasn’t until I read the first few lines that I realized how bruised and impacted with sand my knees had become: our sense of duty and sacrifice often goes unnoticed by us, unchallenged until someone like her reminds us of the futility of suffering for no defensible reason. I felt my heart lift.

Instead, share your pain and despair with me, she asks. I’ll share with you. Let’s lift one another up in the slap and tumble of life rather than pulling our selves down for some imagined but non-existent good. It doesn’t serve us. It doesn’t serve others.

Her work is also an example of another of poetry’s great strengths: giving us fresh eyes with which to see. We know rocks are rocks, and rain is rain, but the image of falling water as clear pebbles is so very right that we are immediately drawn out of our habitual view into perceiving the world differently.

Like the Impressionist artists, we can unfocus our eyes and perceive nothing but shapes and colors and dazzle, before we knew they had names and categories. Mary Oliver’s poetry is infused with these sideways, corner-of-the-eye revelations which serve to open us to previously hidden dimensions.

The Guest House by Jalaluddin Rumi likewise gave me a view of things from an entirely different angle. We all want happiness. Feelings of despair, anger, confusion and doubt can feel like an unwanted detour on the road toward bliss.

Rumi suggests instead that we invite these things on in. Befriend them. They may have gifts to offer us. The beautiful paradox is that by welcoming these negative feelings, we transform their painful, sour nature into the sweet honey of understanding and growth, as they proceed to sweep the cluttered deadwood of sloth and bad habit right out the door.

A while back I was taking part in quite a few art and craft festivals every year. I’d spend days preparing, set up my booth in a 10×10 tent ~ in all types of weather * ~ and display my Skyboy wares for a day or three. Then back to the studio to sort, replace, and reorganize for the next event.

They were always enjoyable times, but also an inconceivable amount of work, time and money. Often as not I went home with little of substance to show for the effort. I began to feel defeated, sour, beaten…I could have just stayed in bed, for all that was gained.

Then I stumbled upon The Man Watching by Rainer Maria Rilke. Reading it was like donning a new pair of glasses. Rilke’s last four lines brought forth bitter but healing tears.** I realized I’d been wrestling with angels, and that the effort was anything but wasted.

I’d been so focussed on “winning” as the definition of success (and not even knowing what that meant to me!) that I forgot my real reasons for engaging in the fairs: to share my passion with others. To connect with people. To do what I could to lift the world’s spirit, and in doing so, my own. In those ways, my participation in the fairs was an unqualified and resounding success.

Each “defeat” now appeared more like a victory: of learning, of strengthening, of readying myself for greater entities with which to grapple. I will likely attend art fairs in the future, but maybe now I’ll be more practiced with the storms. And who knows, the angel might wrestle differently next time!

* I lost two entire tents to wind and water. *Sigh*
** Translating poetry from a foreign tongue is notoriously difficult. This rendering was by Edward Snow, but there are others, notably by Robert Bly, that are worth searching for. The lines that hit me so hard read something like “Winning does not interest him / he grows by being decisively defeated / by successively greater entities.”

Equally as enlightening as reading poetry is the writing of it. So lastly, I’ll share a poem of my own from Come Home, Child that tries in its imperfect way to describe what the writing does for its author.

Turning In

Wee hours spent in restless turning
Tossing, wide-eyed useless yearning
A thousand imps inside my head
Enough! I cry, jump out of bed

Stumble to the study where
I seek a poem for comfort there
I Shelly, Rumi, Frost awaken
Find their wisdom has been taken

Not a single book I read
Seems to give me what I need
None I pull down from the shelf
Knows me better than myself

My sleepless spirit starts to sink
Until I spy a pen with ink
My eyes then come to rest upon
Some paper to be written on

I coax the words into a form
Will comfort me until the morn
The words will bring me what I seek
If I allow my heart to speak

Wisdom comes when I but ask
Writing toward it is my task
I find my purpose not on shelf
But in friendship with myself

I have what I sought in tomes
Upon this page in my own poems
Back to bed, the covers on
To soundly slumber till the dawn.

You can buy the book here: Come Home, Child

But if you don’t get help here, get help somewhere! The best way to introduce yourself to poetry is to read. Go get a book, go online, read a poem. If you don’t like it, move on and try another one. Dante to Maya Angelou. Anita Gorman to Shakespeare, Dickinson to David Whyte, Pablo Naruda, William Blake, Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes, Robert Frost, Emerson, Whitman, Robert Service….the list is delightfully endless.

And then, when you least expect it. may you strike into a revelation that is shown as if to no one else but you, a very private and personal message. It will feel as if it is your own heart which speaks such profound and timeless wisdom back to you.