Monday, March 18, 2013

How to Enjoy Poetry



from Brain Pickings
"Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world."
"True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than coincidences, into a living entity," Edward Hirsch advised in his directive on how to read a poem. But how, exactly, does one cultivate such "true poetic practice"? In an essay plainly, promisingly titled "How to Enjoy Poetry," found in the 1985 anthology How to Use the Power of the Printed Word (public library) – the same treasure trove that gave us Kurt Vonnegut's 8 timeless rules of writing, and Bill Cosby's 3 proven strategies for reading faster – the poet and novelist James Dickey, winner of the National Book Award for his poetry collection Buckdancer's Choice, offers some timeless and breathtakingly articulated advice:

Dickey begins at the beginning:
What is poetry? And why has it been around so long? … When you really feel it, a new part of you happens, or an old part is renewed, with surprise and delight at being what it is.
Exploring your connection with other imaginations and the mystical quality of creativity, Dickey writes:
The first thing to understand about poetry is that it comes to you from outside you, in books or in words, but that for it to live, something from within you must come to it and meet it and complete it. Your response with your own mind and body and memory and emotions gives a poem its ability to work its magic; if you give to it, it will give to you, and give plenty.
Dickey reverses E. B. White's famous statement that the writer should seek to lift the reader up, placing an equal responsibility on the reader in turn:
When you read, don't let the poet write down to you; read up to him. Reach for him from your gut out, and the heart and muscles will come into it, too.

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