Sheila Reads Her Poems for National Poetry Month
Last week, I posted a reading I made of my poems for Writing It Real members. The link to the YouTube video is below. This week I added the YouTube video of a reading I gave outdoors in Port Townsend at Wilderbee Farm two summers ago. I hope you enjoy both of the readdings.
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For National Poetry Month, at the link below, I am posting a reading from my own poetry, something I originally posted in 2017. Much of what I read and said about poetry in those political times resonates today. For me, poetry is an everyday experience and so there aren’t huge production values or perfect lighting in this video. Just me sharing my poems and talking to you about what I hope poetry accomplishes for humanity. You can find the poems in my book Behind Us the Way Grows Wider.
What is National Poetry Month?
The Academy of American Poets inaugurated National Poetry Month in 1996. It is now the largest literary celebration in the world with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets celebrating poetry’s vital place in our culture.
You’ll find lots of information about what is happening globally, nationally, and in your region online and at your local libraries and bookstores. Type in “National Poetry Month events” along with your location to start.
But what is poetry? Not the difficult to understand words you struggled through in school because teachers thought to struggle made you smarter. A Wikpedia entry states that poetry (the word derives from the Greek term, poiesis, “making”) is “a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.” The mphasis is my own. Once you’ve read a poem, although the words make sense in an everyday way, they go far beyond that everyday information to insight and deepening feelings. Poems are meant to be felt, to deliver experience, and to say what might have been, before the poem existed, unsayable.
An article in the Huffington Post asks:
What do we, as readers, want from a poem? On the one hand, plenty of poetry readers are alive and well who want to experience a kind of clarification; to feel and see deeply into the world that they inhabit, to make or read poetry that “helps you to live,” that characterizes and clarifies human nature. To scoff at this motivation for poetry because it is “unsophisticated” or because it seems sentimental—well, you might as well scoff at oxygen.
Your action items for National Poetry Month:
- 1. Sign up to receive a poem a day in your inbox.
- 2. Read, How a Poem Happens, a blog in which poets share one of their poems and write about the birth of that poem.
- 3. Go to a bookstore and browse the poetry bookshelves. Linger with the poems that cause you to make that little sound in your throat that communicates a gut reaction and means the experience the poem imparts has gone right to your senses rather than causing you to try to decipher its meaning. You will have a “felt sense of meaning ” and it will nourish you.
- 4. Read as many poems as you can to get the sound of poetry inside of you. Whether you write poetry or prose this will help you write well.