Don Freas - Poetry

A poem on the page is a script for an event that takes place when you read the poem, or listen as it is spoken. For best results, read them aloud! If you really want to feel a poem, shout it a few times, then read it in a whisper. Feel what happens when you do.

Poems in a book or magazine look a great deal like writing, and so when we approach a poem we have a tendency to treat it like writing, which is confusing. Because we spend a lot of time reading silently—novels, the news, reports—when we come to a poem we barrel through it in the same way and often don’t make it through. Poetry uses the written word as a container, as a means of travel, and as a way to reproduce. Once it arrives a poem must be unpackaged, set free, in order to be experienced. That’s where you come in.

You have to take your time with a poem. And listen to the sound it makes. Ezra Pound said that’s the way to understand poetry—you listen to the sound. There’s something about the way the sounds rattle and spark our hearts when we speak that makes a difference; we bring more of our bodies into the experience than we would with just the rapid circuit from eye to brain. I can’t explain it; that’s how it feels to me. You have to play with poetry to find the groove.

I often say I hate poetry. It’s a joke with some truth in it. Poetry is an ultimately subjective experience. Most of the poems I come across don’t touch a chord in me, so I can feel that I’ve wasted my time reading them. It’s a little like panning for gold. You have to know how to pick a likely site, then you shovel off a lot of overburden, wash out the gravel. Maybe you’ll find a nugget, maybe not. You certainly won’t if you don’t dig in.

I have to look through a lot of poetry before I find that one poem that twists my heart into a new form. But that one poem is priceless and always worth the search. I may find one poem that resonates in the whole lifework of a poet. But if I hadn’t looked I wouldn’t know that poem. And you might feel I’ve picked the worst poem that poet wrote! That’s something I love about poetry.

Making poems is a craft some of us do because we have to. The primary task is to be putting the thoughts and ideas down on paper, as much as possible. The more you do the more will come. About ninety-five percent of what most of us put down on paper will be useless. The trick is that the vast majority of useless stuff crowding our notebooks is a necessary setting for the good stuff that wanders through from time to time. If you aren’t paying attention and writing down everything, you’ll miss it. Sounds a little like panning for gold, again, doesn’t it. It is.

The little-noticed bonus is what making poems does for you. Some of the overburden that you have to shovel off in the quest for poems turns out to be stuff that’s in the way of your living. It just happens.