One fine Spring day, my highschool Lit teacher, Mr. L invited a guest speaker into our classroom. She was a former student of his, currently enrolled in university and majoring in English Literature. Our class had spent the last month discussing and trying our hand at poetry, and she was there to further our appreciation for it. I'll never forget the sharp way in which she rebuked us for attempting poetry without having read poetry. To roughly paraphrase her, our awkward attempts would not be, could not be, what they should be without knowledge of what poetry had been. I recall being quite put off by her assertion. My adolescent thought process was, what did she know, really? I had to put a good five years of distance between myself and that dressing down before I could recognize the veracity of her statement.
It happened in the bedroom of Michael Hobson after a night of videogames and laughter -- an unexpected moment of unprompted poetry. As we sat on the edge of his bed, he rattled off a poem. His nasal voice took on an odd purity as his mouth shaped the words. And they struck me, they lit a fire within me, one which seemed to pour into my four limbs, into my soul. What a strange time, a strange place to have a 'come to poetry' moment! On the bed of a cute boy, in the middle of a nameless night.
I scoured the local Barnes and Noble's for 'Spoon River Anthology' by Edgar Lee Masters. Copy in hand, I spent subsequent nights reading this American classic. I love to read, typically burning through a book in a few short hours. But with this, I limited myself to 2-3 poems a night just before bed. I lingered over them, lingered over the many voices and stories and histories of a fictional town and its fictional souls. I carried Minerva, Emily Sparks and The Village Atheist into sleep, into dreams. They spoke of poetry and of fire, and then I knew it too.
That all the clay of you, all of the dross of you,
May yield to the fire of you,
Till the fire is nothing but light! . . .
Nothing but light!
A door was blown open that night, in that room, but each poem read drew me across the threshold. My opened mind sought other masterworks: Cummings, Plath, Kerouac, Rilke. With each one came a deepening appreciation for the craft as well as a recognition of Masters's flaws. Still, his work was my gateway poetry-drug and nothing can dim that fact. So, here's to the one that started it all, The Village Atheist:
Ye young debater over the doctrine
Of the soul's immortality,
I who lie here was the village atheist,
Talkative, contentious, versed in the arguments
Of the infidels.
But through a long sickness
Coughing myself to death
I read the Upanishads and the poetry of Jesus.
And they lighted a torch of hope and intuition
And desire which the Shadow,
Leading me swiftly through the caverns of darkness,
Could not extinguish.
Listen to me, ye who live in the senses
And think through the senses only:
Immortality is not a gift,
Immortality is an achievement;
And only those who strive mightily
Shall possess it.
--
currently working my way through Rhapsody's classical music section
much to the delight of my ears ^_^
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