Local Opinion: Approaching Poetry “on little cat feet”

I selected this line from Carl Sandburg’s poem as the title for a University of Arizona OLLI course I teach due to the fact that it demonstrates how a poem can come gently padding into your life and take you by surprise, even if you believe you dislike poetry. Think of how fog tends to sneak in like a cat, gradually settling over a harbor or city. Our lives, whether we confess or not, are surrounded by poetry. We breathe it like air. We reside in metaphors and similes, calling our next-door neighbor a horse’s ass or stating that a particular political leader appears like an orc from Mordor. In a sense, all language is metaphorical. We utilize it to continuously call something another or compare it to that thing.

OK, so possibly you don’t really dislike poetry. Maybe you feel it’s simply not your thing or that it has no significance to your life. Or that it’s filled with “thees” and “thous” and appears composed in such abstruse, highfalutin language as if it were something that requires to be deciphered.

You understand that lyric from a preferred tune whose wonderful lines you keep singing over and over in the shower? Well, that’s how the earliest poems were shared. They were sung. You might recognize with this very first verse of Dylan Thomas’s popular poem. “Do not go gentle into that good night/Old age should burn and rave at close of day/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Kind of like what rocker Neil Young sang in Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black): “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Tragically, it was likewise part of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s suicide note. Do you get the sensation they might have checked out Dylan Thomas?

Or possibly it’s a line from a speech, essay, or play that moves you to tears, however you don’t understand why. Or when we state that something we check out in an unique or hear somebody state is pure poetry. It’s like somebody speaking straight to you, pulling on all your psychological strings with words so ideal you can’t picture them being said any other method. While you may consider this line by Hamlet as prose, it is likewise poetry in every sense of the word. “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” How could we ever surpass that?

Don’t let anybody inform you what poems you must check out or what they suggest. That’s in between you and the poet on the page. It’s what Ruth Stephan pictured when she initially established the University of Arizona Poetry Center in 1960, where an individual can “discover poetry for herself or himself by browsing alone, selecting alone, and reading alone in a quiet atmosphere.” She desired there to be no intermediaries in between you and the poet, no snotty critics or instructors to inform you what’s good or not. So forget whatever you found out in English class about poems, specifically that ridiculous concern “What does the poem mean?” Who cares? The more crucial concern is, do you like it? How does it make you feel? According to Emily Dickinson, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

We are lucky to reside in this city of art, where on almost every street corner, there’s some form of art work, consisting of poems to check out and take pleasure in while you await the Sun Link. And a wonderful location like the Poetry Center — consider it, an entire building dedicated exclusively to poetry. So go get some poems and make your head take off!