Poetry

Reading is therapeutic. I came home quite exhausted from the madhouse that was work today. It was a night when I could really have used someone to lean on. Instead of succumbing to my fancies, however, I began reading poetry and wikipedia articles-- aloud at first, then eventually falling into silent reading. I'm spending this year reading poetry because I don't understand it, or understand it very little. Why do I bother? I am convinced that there must be something to it, these fanciful words that either rhyme or don't rhyme at all, all these murky allusions, and the worship of Shelley, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Rilke, Ginsberg...to me, poetry is like a secret, incomprehensible world to which I lack the key, but on the other side of which there is something marvelous. For now, I read it for pure sound like the way I hear French sometimes nowadays. Sometimes the rhythm of a line (or of several lines) or a particular string of words strikes me as really lovely. What I do understand is that every little thing that you read or see or hear affects your brain in often imperceptible ways, and so I do not consider reading poetry with such little understanding of it a waste of my time.

The first book of poetry I ever read was Whitman's Leaves of Grass, the whole of which I read on the 11-hour plane ride from Istanbul to the States in June 2009. The book was passed on to me by a great friend, Jess. The second was Rilke's Duino Elegies, lent to me by my free-spirited roommate Holly, and which I read last year. The third was Gibran's The Prophet, which was given to me by a regular customer at the shop. I enjoyed reading this one particularly because my copy was in French; reading books in French is like a great jigsaw puzzle for me. Had I read The Prophet in my native English, I think I would have found it rather cliche overall.

The fourth, which I am currently reading was lent to me by a girl called Kata, whom I met one night at Capogiro's and never saw again. She is 24 and her best friend is a 77-year-old man-- another regular customer at the shop. The book is Ginsberg's Kaddish, and I find it to be the most accessible book of poetry I've read yet. It is largely autobiographical, the first section devoted to writings about his mentally ill mother, which I found heartbreaking-- for him a hell of a lot more than for her. As is usually the case with mentally ill folks and their loved ones. Tonight, I found myself reading Ginsberg's Wikipedia page and was intrigued to discover just how progressive, humanist, and pacificist a man he had been.

Rumi, T.S. Eliot, and Baudelaire are on the agenda, as are non-poetry books. This year will be a year of books. I will find solace, beauty, rhythm, secrets, ideas, voices, and wisdom between the pages.

Aside from reading poetry visually, I found this gem online.