Poetry

I love the ability to write about a single moment. To draw it out and feel it, taste it, and write about it with such imagery as the poetry did this week. Even though the first two poems were translations, I still enjoyed them and thought that the translator did an excellent job. I found myself reading every poem multiple times and then reading them out loud.

It's strange to hear yourself read a poem out loud because it never quite sounds the same as it did in your mind, even though it is your mind and your voice, something still gets lost in the translation. But, I found that I concentrated on different lines than I did when I was only looking at the words. Physical sound added a whole other layer and made me look at the words differently. When looking at a poem, it is the line breaks that emphasis the words, but when reading it aloud, it is your own natural pauses and the natural rhythm of speech that give the piece its music.

My favorite to read out loud was "Bored" by Margaret Atwood, especially those last three sentences: "Now I wouldn't be bored. / Now I would know too much. / Now I would know." Those were the most powerful to me, whether reading the poem out loud or in my head. They summed up all the emotion in the poem, that sense of loss and regret. It was such a beautifully sad poem that anyone can relate to: the fact that there is a countless number of moments we didn't realize as precious until we were adults and could never have them again.

"Bone" by Mary Oliver was also fun to read. She used so many alliterations ("house of hearing," "fractions and facts") and sometimes just her wording of things ("Though I play at the edges of knowing"). The numbered breaks at first seemed random, but they actually reflect Oliver's changes in thought. Each is three stanzas and in the first she talks about the soul, then spends time on the whale's ear bone, then on the mystery of things we know to exist but have never seen or touched, and finally she returns to the soul. I notice now, that she begins with the end, the fact that we do not understand the soul, then goes on to explain how she came to that conclusion. Looking at it this way, Oliver's poem is quite organized and follows a natural, but planned, pattern of thought. My favorite part was the end of the second section: "the soul / might be like this / so hard, so necessary - / yet almost nothing."

Overall, I thought all the pieces were beautifully written and I got a lot of enjoyment reading them to myself.

-Justyne Marin