Do you hate poetry?

I did a thing just for you!

This is absolutely unrelated to my existing works in progress or anything productive at all, really.

This is, however, related to my current season of life, because stress does weird things to my brain.

Last night as I was falling asleep stressing out about fifty thousand and one things, the first few lines of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If—” flashed into my head. Combine that with the fact that I have, for a long time, wanted to do a series of…somethings…basically teaching people how to enjoy poetry. AKA poetry appreciation for people who hate poetry.

I don’t have enough of an academic background to approach poetry from that angle, and I wouldn’t want to anyway. Instead, I want to invite you to experience a poem. A poem is to a novel what a painting is to a movie, we might say. A movie tells a story, gives you characters and a plot arc and a whole series of emotions. A painting, captures a moment, but in that moment we can still become immersed in the emotions and desire of the artist. And from there, we can start to discover our own emotional response to that piece of art.

Take, for instance, Van Gogh’s The Starry Night:

This isn’t a peaceful, quiet night sky, even if it is a countryside scene. There’s a sense of movement and energy in the heavens, like a whole drama is going on above the sleepy village. Depending on my mood, it might make me feel curious or it might just feel chaotic. Either way I’m drawn in, intrigued by the movement and texture.

The same is true for a poem. The key to reading poetry, in my opinion, is curiosity — about the poet, the poem itself, and one’s own response to it.

All this to say…

I recorded a video on my back patio over my lunch break, and decided to see how it might work. Low-budget, limited prep, bad lighting, but I finished it and pushed “post” before I could chicken out. So…here you go. :) It’ll be posting on YouTube tomorrow (link here, after 10AM it’s shareable.)

I have a few more poems in mind, mostly easy-access ones (and, of course, “The Cremation of Sam McGee” for Halloween…)

Let me know what you think! What poems or aspects of poetry might you want to see covered? (And hey, maybe I’ll never do this again! But it’s good to be creative now and then.)

Love,

Rebecca

P.S. Hitting send before I can chicken out AGAIN.