Been Readin' Poetry

It is rainy and cloudy today in Minnesota... a good day to talk about poetry.

I taught English and Literature for 12 years, ending in 2007. The problem with being an English teacher is that you don't really have time to read. Yes, I hope that elicited a chuckle. However, it is a true statement, properly understood. What it means is that you don't have time to read anything that you actually want to read. You only have time to keep current with curriculum. For example, I've read A Tale of Two Cities ten times. The Giver? Thirteen times. You get the point.

My mother-in-law, Sheila, brought us several volumes of best-loved poems of the American people this spring. I ignored them for a while and finally delved in a few days ago to see what kinds of poems these were, and how does one decide if a poem is best-loved by the American people?

It turns out that the compiler was an editor of a major American newspaper, and that she received requests all the time to publish this poem or that. So she kept a tally of what was requested how often, and the winners became yes, Best Loved Poems of the American People. Sadly, I don't think too many of us contemporary folk even have best-loved poems, or any poems. Except for song lyrics, we have become a culture devoid of poetry and too little interested in anything of beauty that requires patience or skill to create.

In protest of this, I am reading poetry. I read Ella Wheeler Wilcox's "Growing Old" and several others whose names I cannot yet remember. I also recognize lines here and there that my mother used to recite at random as she did her housework. She never knew the whole poem or whole song, only enough to call it mind.

Speaking of literature, Jan Karon has a new novel out called Home to Holly Springs. Tara and I both love Jan Karon, the author of The Mitford Series which features Father Timothy Kavanagh and a host of supporting charachters. These books weave together her gentle sense of humor, small-town life, a love of writing and quoting other writers, and Father Tim's believable walk with the Lord.