The Powerful Nutrition of Poetry
By Barbara O'Neal | August 26, 2015 |
The late great Ray Bradbury once said that a writer should read one poem, one short story and one essay every day. Most of us don’t read many short stories any more, but we read a lot of essays (often in the form of blogs).
Poetry is like the superfood of writing education. Reading it daily is one of the best possible things any writer of any ilk can do to improve the quality and precision of her work. We shy away from it sometimes, sure we can’t find poems that will hold meaning for us in the modern world, but believe me, there is a poem for every moment, every project, every mood and idea you’ve ever thought of.[pullquote]Poetry is good words, good phrases, like vitamins A and C and E, like minerals for your paragraphs.[/pullquote]
I’ve been on a kick of memorizing poetry. I happened to hear Mary Oliver on a podcast, talking about her work, and she read a few of my favorite poems. I stood in the garden, listening, starstruck, and thought, I need to have these poems in my head all the time.
So I started memorizing them. I began with Wild Geese, which is an exhortation to look outward, upward, let go of your loneliness and shame and breathe in the life all around you. “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles, repenting,” she says. And, “No matter who you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination. It calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting.” Read the entire poem here.
Who doesn’t recognize some piece of those emotions? We’ve all felt shame, and loneliness, and felt apart from things. In these few short lines, the shame is brushed aside, the loneliness and despair embraced, and we fly free with the wild geese “who are on their way home again.”
Such economy of language! Such a wise, understanding voice! When I memorized it, I broke it into several pieces and recited it aloud to myself on my morning walk with my dog, over and over until all the pieces stuck. Not easy, but a very simple practice, and one that bears big benefits. I’m on to some other things now, but once or twice a week, I offer that one up to the sky, letting it sink more deeply into the folds of my imagination.
The first bit of poetry I memorized was Shakespeare. I was fourteen and obsessed with the Zefferelli film of Romeo and Juliet, which had been rereleased in my town. My father took me because it was rated R. Then my mother. My grandmother. Probably an uncle or cousin or two. I saw it ten or eleven times before it left town again.
Awash with it, I memorized all the lines from the balcony scene. Much of it is still there: “But soft, what light from yonder window breaks? It is the East and Juliet is the sun.”
I forced my sister to read it with me, over and over, until now, many decades later, I can still call up those elegant, beautiful words, hear the cadence in my head, in my own voice. Shakespeare’s genius of alliteration and humor and iambic pentameter burned right into my writer’s brain, in my own voice.
It is said that if you record affirmations and play them back to yourself, you’re more likely to believe them to be true. I think this is also true of poetry. If you hear it in your own voice, you’re going to internalize it more completely, and you will learn to phrase your own words with precision and freshness because you’ve poured all those nutrients into your brain. Good words, good phrases, like vitamins A and C and E, like minerals for your paragraphs.
Poetry also leads to story ideas in surprising ways. Some years ago, I happened to see a movie about Federico Garcia Lorca. It was one of things I stumbled over at the video store or something—I remember watching it alone on a Saturday afternoon, enchanted and crushed by the story of the Spanish poet. I’d already been on a Spanish poetry kick, reading Pablo Neruda and an entire list a bilingual old man brought to me, carefully divided into old world and new world poets.
But Lorca electrified me. His poem, Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, a cry of grief over the loss of a friend to the bullright, uses repetition to create the sound of a ticking clock:
At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready prepared
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone.
Read the rest of the poem
The poem sank into me, so heartbreaking, so rich. I was going through a fairly hard time myself, grieving my marriage, writing a book that was heartbroken, and Spanish poetry provided a thread of beauty and loss that gave me a spine for the book.
Obviously, we don’t all like the same poets—but all of us can find poets we love. Look to music, perhaps—Bruce Springsteen’s Used Cars, or Tupac Shakur’s Brenda’s Got a Baby. Take the music away and read the words aloud to yourself. Look for poetry from people of color and from other continents and cultures. Look for beat poets and maybe amble through the Cavalier Poets. Read some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Go to the Academy of American Poets app, Poem-A-Day and read some new work there.
When you find some work that speak to you, memorize it. Keep saying it to yourself until the words sink deep into your brain, into your connective tissue, and let it teach you how to be a better writer, one word a time.
And then maybe when we’re old, all that will be left of our brains will be the lines of poetry we’ve settled there, deep in those folds. One can only hope.
What are some of your favorite poems? Do you read poetry aloud as a regular practice?
[coffee]
Barbara O’Neal is the author of more than a dozen award-winning, bestselling novels, including the runaway bestseller, When We Believed in Mermaids, which has been published in more than 20 countries and spent many months on the Amazon Charts, as well as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller lists. Barbara lives on the beach in rugged Oregon with her husband, a British endurance athlete who vows he’ll never lose his accent and their zoo of cats and dogs. You can find more information on her newsletter and where to find her on social media at barbaraoneal.com.
this is one of the most stimulating talks I have ever read o. poetry. Thank you Barbara.
Thanks Barbara for reminding us that good poetry can inspire our writing. I haven’t memorised a poem since I was in school, but I do start every morning reading a few poems on a poetry website (along with the new blog each day on Writer Unboxed)! Sometimes a poem that I read in the morning will resonate within me for the rest of the day. By the way, Mary Oliver’s poems about nature have always been a favourite of mine, as well as Peter Bakowski’s poems about life.
Love Mary Oliver, and Yeats, and Whitman. Another favorite is May Sarton, a forgotten poet who wrote amazing journals. I went through a stage when I was reading poems every day during lunch. You’ve reminded me to get back to that. Lovely post, Barbara.
Paula, thanks for that reminder. I’d forgotten May Sarton! A wonderful poet.
Oh. I started doing that just recently (I mean within the past week) by committing some Emily Dickenson to memory, so I can relax with her. It’s occurred to me to add more to the supply, so I’m happy to read this posting.
And there are a number of old ones back there already, from the distant past. The Walrus and the Carpenter, anyone?
I have a book of Mary Oliver’s poems that I’ve been meaning to get to…and after reading Wild Geese, I am definitely bumping it up my TBR pile. Just lovely.
Thank you for the reminder. :)
As a writer who self-identifies as a poet, I felt such a thrill finding this in my inbox. I love reading poetry out loud. My family has become used to hearing Shakespeare, or Whitman when I get a long bath. I adore spoken word poet Sara Kay. I think you would like her poem “B”. Listen to her first on Youtube, then perhaps read it aloud for yourself. Modern poet Paige Ackerson-Kiley and contemporary poet Stephanie Young are another two of my favorites. Thank you for this post. Now I want to take my coffee to my back yard and read poetry aloud while the cicadas sing.
Tonia, the Sara Kay YouTube knocked me out. Thank you so much!
Everyday I receive a poem from Poets.org and the ones that really speak to me, and I mean speak to me down to my bones, I sit and mull over. And let it wash over me. Then send it out to share the poem with as many people as possible.
I get that email, too, Lidy. I think our own Therese Walsh turned me on to it.
Love this! Agree 100%! I signed up for poemaday and a new poem shows up in my inbox every morning. Such a treat.
Barbara–
As always, what you say in your post is worth reading. I also happen to agree with you about poetry being an important element in any writer’s reading. That is, any writer who takes her/his work seriously.
What follows isn’t really related to what you’re writing about, but here goes. While working on an early draft of my latest novel, Deep North, I wrote a scene in which–unbidden–a Mary Oliver poem appeared. By this I don’t mean that the poem was brought to mind because of the scene; I mean it was integral to the scene–to the moment, to the two women having a private conversation on the stern of a big houseboat. One of them reads the poem aloud.
As such phenomena do, I thought the poem would eventually “go away,” but it never did. In the end, I came to feel I had no choice but to shell out serious money for the right to integrate the complete poem into the final published book. And so I did, and I’m convinced I was right to do it.
Would such a decision be thinkable for a writer planning to submit her genre novel to an agent? I’m absolutely sure it would not.
Thanks for another great post.
That is a fantastic choice, Barry. I’ve made the choice to pay for poems, too, and it’s totally worth it.
Barbara, thank you for explaining why poetry is so essential. Until this summer, when I studied Poem Making by Myra Livingston Cohn, I never really sought to analyze why, so reading your post was a great joy. My favorites: The Owl and the Pussycat, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and so many others.
I find myself playing with poems when I’m in between projects or if I want to switch gears. Playing with words frees up something inside me. Good advice from Ray Bradbury. For the past couple of years I’ve begun my day with an abbreviated Liturgy of the Hours and the sheer beauty of some of the psalms has me looking for ways to sing them (I find I memorize best when I sing). Then there are the hymns as well. My 1940 hymnal is dog eared. I agree that memorization brings about greater depth and understanding because they become part of your marrow.
Singing is a great way to memorize! I was thinking that as I wrote my post, and wondered if I could find a way to teach myself how to do that.
Psalms are great poetry, of course.
I love, too, the poetry of the Bible. Some of the loveliest poetry in all literature comes from the Books of Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiates. What describes best in the spirit of a lovely woman? For me, she is not well described by Tupac Shakur, but by Solomon. Can’t help but sigh when he says that says, in part, “She also rises while it is yet night,
And provides food for her household,
And a portion for her maidservants.” And, ““Many daughters have done well,
But you excel them all.” Sigh again.
And don’t forget the Song of Solomon. Beautiful stuff there, too.
I love reading your posts, Barbara. And because I respect you so much, because everything you say resonates so clearly with me, including this essay, I got a bit sad and self-reproaching reading this post. When it comes to poetry – reading it, knowing it, understanding it, even seeking understanding – I suck. I wasn’t even going to comment; was just going to vow to try-try again.
Afterward I was talking to my sister. We’d just spent five days at my brother’s, helping him move. She’d commented often while we were there how I was constantly singing, humming, or whistling as we worked (can you believe he has no means of playing music?! Just a damn chatterbox TV – which I hate as background noise, and turned off at every opportunity, only to have him turn it back on again). We were talking about how good it is to be home, and she said, “I can hear your music is on; bet you’re glad to have that back in your life.”
And I am. When we hung up, the song playing was The Staves’ lovely, haunting Blood I Bled. I realized I knew every word. I went to a lyrics site and read them aloud, sans music:
“Calm the quickening feet that fall
Calm the gathering rain
Suffering as I suffer you
You, when you speak of pain
If I was, if I am, if I did, if I have
Calm the quickening feet that fall (Hide behind you)
Calm the gathering rain
Suffering as I suffer you (Will be tied up)
You, when you speak of pain
If I was, if I am, if I did, if I have
Raise your banners and ride to war (Just/Unrighteous)
Scouring around your name (Fortune finders)
See the damage of challenge raised (Just/Unrighteous)
Oh, sudden leave your blame (Fortune finders)
Pick up my roots and now leaves are dead
They tumbled down in pools of all the blood I bled
If I want, if I am, if I ever did, if I ever had…”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I thought. There is poetry in my life. (I will seek more, sans music, though. So vowed.)
Vaughn, I’m glad you recognized that your music IS poetry. And since singing takes the lyrics right down into the deepest heart, it performs the same function as poetry read aloud.
Barbara, what a beautiful post. Poetry is food for the soul. and I’ve neglected including it in my daily diet. I’ve written so many poems, inspired by my father, a blue collar worker, who quoted poetry often, ones he’d memorized up to the ninth grade when he quit school altogether. He quit school but his love poetry stayed with him. You’ve reminded me to get back to it.
As for Wild Geese, what is it about them that sparks the imagination? In my debut novel, chapter one, Catherine Fitzgerald is reviewing her lavender fields in Provence. “A raucous honking caught her attention and she glanced up to watch a vee of gray geese fly low over her fields. She raised her hand in salutation. They knew where they going, unlike her.”
Thank you so much for the reminder. Life gets so full, at least I make it that, but I need to make time for poetry, both mine and others.
I’m with Vaughn. I never developed an appreciation for poetry, but I love some song lyrics that have stuck with me through the years. Interestingly, my book editor is a poet and she has a wonderful feel for the rhythm and cadence of language. She has helped me enormously to develop that talent for writing that flows. Thanks Barbara, for another thoughtful post.
Thank you for a great post today, Barbara! While I’ve found a way to incorporate reading (and attempting to write) poetry into my “diet” I haven’t yet practiced reading them aloud. I always thought I would feel silly—and yet, as you and Vaughn discussed above, I do it all the time when it comes to song lyrics!
I’m glad you mentioned economy of language. My drafts are filled with lots of rambling, and I truly believe reading poetry on a regular basis helps me remember that white space is essential, even when it comes to prose.
My first beloved poem (speaking of white space) is by Wendell Berry:
Like Snow
Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly.
leaving nothing out.
To me it’s as calming as the bible verse, “Be still and know that I am God.”
Another favorite (as a lover of the magic of storytelling) is by Albertio Rios, called
When There Were Ghosts
Thank you for sharing both of those, Barb. I am going to add the Rios to my memorization list. It’s so delightful. And you’re right that the Berry is calming. I’d like to paint that feeling.
Here’s one I love, and that feeds me when I work. ‘When You are Old’ by WB Yeats;
When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book.
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrow of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And his his face amid of crowd of stars.
Thanks so much for this reminder, Barbara, of how poetry speaks right to the heart!
My best loved poem is The Last Duchess by Robert Browning. It is about a man, talking about his former wife, but what he has to say says more about him than it does about her. Read in cadence over and over until the underlying meanings and double entendre lead you to a dreadful conclusion. Absolutely brilliant!
I am spending an awful lot of time listening to Pandora and reading the poems recommended here. What a wonderful thing to be a writer in a community like this one!
“How do I love this post? Let me count the ways…”
Poetry was the seed that led me to write. Mrs. Boston, my first grade teacher, introduced me to poetry. To this day I will periodically recite the first poem she taught us:
Mud is very nice to feel,
All squishy-squash between the toes!
I’d rather wade in wiggly mud,
Than smell a yellow rose.
Nobody else but the rosebush knows,
How nice mud feels between the toes.
—Polly Chase Boyden
This silly little poem launched a life-long romance with writing. I intended to be a poet, then the stage beckoned and I began to write plays, then my plays morphed into prose. But throughout all the years I’ve been writing, poetry is the touchstone, it is the form I return to when I need to unearth the BIG stuff.
Poetry has taken a bigger place in my daily life since my month-long Artist Date in Ireland this summer. The country, the people, the writers were such a powerful inspiration, my commitment to live up to the lineage of writers that have gone before me has grown deeper roots. So now, every morning after yoga I pull out my journal and set my inner poet free. It’s the very best way to lubricate the muse.
Now thanks to this lovely post, I believe it’s time to honor Mrs. Boston and recite the poems, old & new, that inspire me.
Thanks for giving us permission to dance with our inner poet, Barbara. Brilliant post!
One of my earliest memories is of a camping expedition in the Mojave, where my dad read Shelley’s Ozymandias aloud, as the fiery sun sank and turned the horizon of sand a reddish-orange. My chest hurt, because my heart swelled so large with the words I thought it must surely burst through my chest. THAT is what powerful words and music can do to a soul. Beautiful post. Thank uou.
No wonder I have to read WU every day. I learn so much here, it sometimes feels like it’s being written just for me.I’ve always enjoyed poetry, and it has always been part of my reading, but have never made a point of reading it on a daily basis.
About three years ago, one of my grade-school age grandchildren mentioned they were writing haiku at school, something I hadn’t given much thought since freshman English. That got me started on a haiku writing binge, and while I don’t write them every day, my writing is now seasoned with a sprinkling of them. As a lover of word games, the challenge of seventeen syllables is irresistible, even better than a Tweet. Now, instead of crossword puzzles in a waiting room, or when I’m just at loose ends, I write haiku.
As for some favorite poems, as a young girl, “The Wreck of the Hesperus” got to me the way “Romeo and Juliet” got to you. It was the first poem to make me cry. (The first book to make me cry was “The Incredible Journey”, and I think I read both when I was eleven or twelve.) I was also a big fan of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems when I was young, discovered e.e. cummings in high school, and T.S. Elliot and Wallace Stevens in college. My all time favorite poem from music is “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles.
And, the title of my blog, The Flowering Side, comes from Epitaph 7, “Serepta Mason”, in “The Spoon River Anthology”. As I explained in my first blog post, I came across a copy of “The Spoon River Anthology” about a year after my Mom’s death, and was stunned when I read “Serepta Mason” because it could have been her epitaph. Two lines stayed with me, as I realized that if I wanted the people in my village (family and friends) to know my ‘flowering side’, I’d better get busy:
“From the dust I lift a voice of protest:
My flowering side you never saw!”
So, now I write every day, carry a camera and notebook with me at all times, and bring fresh flowers home at least once a week, all things I once felt guilty about ‘wasting’ time and/or money on. I’m not getting old–I’m blooming!
Thank you for this wonderful post, Barbara. I love poetry- I began writing as a poet and I learned so much from the experience. In my last book, I incorporated lines from Emily Dickinson poems into the text, they became a way for two characters to connect to one another on a deeply personal level.
Wild Geese is one of my favorite poems. I also love Billy Collins, whose poems manage to be funny and heartbreaking all at the same time.
Poetry the first form that got my writing attention, but fifteen years alter, that feels like a different life. However, last year, my son’s fourth-grade teacher had the class memorizing and reciting poems every week, and this became a whole-family activity. The assignments turned me on to a book called My America: A Poetry Atlas of the United States, with poems accessible to both kids and adults. Nikki Giovanni has a simple, fabulous poem in it, but my favorite is “The Desert is Holding a Giant Breath.”
Hi Barbara, I was probably introduced to a love of writing and thinking about words before I could read–because my family loved musical comedies, Rogers and Hammerstein etc and I learned all the words to those songs and sang them over and over. Even at five, I’m just a girl who can’t say no! But the next step was poetry and from there writing down short lines of something I could probably call verse. I always sang to my children, hoping to stimulate love of music and WORDS in them. It worked. So thanks for this, Mary Oliver is a favorite.
I loved this post, Barbara. I recently started reading poetry after looking up “Tommy” by Kipling to understand a reference in another book. Thanks for the heads up on the poetry.org Poem-a-Day. Can’t wait to start getting a new verse in my inbox each day!
Thank you for this. Poetry is something I’ve always struggled with and I often feel as if I’m missing out. I loved the Wild Geese poem and your suggestion to memorize. I can imagine the benefit to one’s writing.
For the last couple years I’ve really enjoyed Marian Call’s lyrics. (mariancall.bandcamp.com) Some favorite phrases: “we watched the sad solstice sun go down” (she’s from Alaska) (https://mariancall.bandcamp.com/track/perilous-road), “I’m new myself /
To this startled state of mental health” and “Or aren’t you tired of somnambulating yet?” (https://mariancall.bandcamp.com/track/coffee-by-numbers-faons-song)
And then this one I have to quote at more length:
“I’m right on task – since you asked – I’m doing great, really I am
I don’t blink, I don’t think, I just press on, press on
I’m doing fine – I’m not inclined to crack anytime soon baby
Left us all behind but we’re still fine – swear we’re fine
“But we cry for no reason
Late at night when we run out of thoughtless things to do
You’re free now and you’re lonely
Please come home so we can cry with you
I hear that you cry too ” (https://mariancall.bandcamp.com/track/in-the-black)
Though there’s certainly merit in reading lyrics without the music, I must say the above is better with music. :) Not just because it’s music, but because her poetry is specifically designed for the rhythms she writes in the music, and sounds better at that rhythm, and it contributes to the meaning. For example, in the first stanza above it just keeps going and going, much as you would read it. But then we come to the second stanza and suddenly everything is slower and much more thoughtful, beginning with a long held note on “we.”
Not exactly a technique we can use writing novels, but still. :) Or at least, to slow down the rhythm in that way, we’d have to use different words. Not just expect the reader to pause on an itty bitty word like “we”!
And on a MUCH sillier note, there’s a song where she internally rhymes with “Cartilaginous”! :)
“Just imagine us beneath the sea,
(Chomp Chomp)
Cartilaginous, fierce, and free!
(Chomp Chomp)” (https://mariancall.bandcamp.com/track/shark-week)
Lovely post! One of the first books I read on my own was a collection of poems for children. I continued reading poetry and eventually writing it. Poetry has been my most consistent form; I was able to compose poems during even the most hectic years, when I had to put prose aside.
Writing poetry has helped my prose in many ways, not just with economy and attention to sound and rhythm, but also with word choice. Each word has to work so hard that I find myself pondering meanings, connotations, etymology, even the shape your mouth makes when you say it. For my thoughts about some words, see #poetswords on Twitter.
Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, May Sarton, Emily Dickinson are all favorites. So are Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, Rainier Marie Rilke. I could go on and on ;-)
My favorite Bradbury story incorporates a poem: “And the Moon Be Still as Bright” from Byron’s “So We’ll Go No More A-Roving”.
Wonderful, wonderful post! I love reading (and writing) poetry, but I have to admit I don’t always manage to read one a day. And yet I always feel better having read one (or two, or three).
The Lorca poem you quote is so, so powerful – I can certainly understand its impact on you. I came across it via a song – a flamenco type lament that chilled me to the core. I haven’t been able to find a recording of it online (I had it on an old vinyl record).
Barbara, I own every book you’ve written and LOVE them all. “The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue” is my favorite. I have the original copies under Barbara Samuel. This is a great article. I have a poetry blog and write poetry. It saved my life from the age of 13. xo