Necessary Speech

As I mentioned earlier, Edward Hirsch wrote the illuminating, moving introduction to the Modern Library edition of Keats' poetry. I saw on the back cover that he had also written a book called 'How To Read A Poem And Fall I Love With Poetry,' which I read for the first time while traveling over the holidays. Hirsch is an amazingly beautiful and generous writer and he is passionate about poetry. If I needed any additional encouragement to pursue my new obsession with poetry, I found it here. Here is a little bit from the Preface:

"In this book I'd like to make poems as available and accessible, as passionate and disturbing, as I feel them to be. Poetry is a form of necessary speech. People who care about it know that poems have magical potency. But now there are many people who have become so estranged from the devices and techniques of poetry, from poetic thinking, that they no longer recognize what they are reading. Reading poetry is endangered, I suppose, because reading itself is endangered in our culture now."

The last sentence is interesting to me, and I don't know if I can completely agree with it. I've always read a lot. A lot. But I never read poetry. Now, the earlier sentence about being estranged from poetic devices and techniques rings very true to me. Reading poetry seems very different from other types of reading because one needs to pay such concentrated attention to each individual word. Poetry is so condensed, compact, and it has to be unfolded slowly. And it helps to keep returning to a poem, again and again, which I don't think we do with books very often. It is rare to take that kind of time and care over our reading, even if we are confirmed readers. But it is worth it. I am discovering that there are things I can get from poetry that I can't get anywhere else in life.

A little further down the page Hirsch says, "...I believe that in the end poems strike something deeper than thought itself." Yes. I feel lucky to have found such a guide.