I've always had an appreciation for language, particularly concise, poignant, highly-visual word images that seem to snap you out of your mental lull in a handful of syllables.
For the most part poetry, however, was completely inaccessible to me. Uninteresting, even. It always felt too angsty, overly pretentious, seemingly trying too hard for it's own good and for my own pragmatic self to appreciate it.
Anyone can fall in love with a few easy-to-digest classics like the ending of 'The Hollow Men' (T.S. Eliot):
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
But nothing beyond those few textbook classics every clicked with me.
I don't know what changed a year or two back, now in my early 40s, but I decided to give poetry another chance recently, and I regret that I wasn't able to appreciate it's condensed, sometimes brutal, sometimes tender, ofttimes hit-and-miss relevance. Maybe just a lack of maturity on my part, but it's brought a lot of value to my life finding a handful of authors that resonate with me.
Most of them well known: W.H. Auden (“All we are not stares back at what we are.”), Seamus Heaney, T.S. Eliot, Baudelaire ("I am the wound and I the knife! \ I am the blow I give, and feel!")
Some unknown to me until recently, and whom I can't remember how I came across, but who I've grown to appreciate a lot: Ocean Vuong is definitely heavy on the angsty side, but God he can turn a phrase, pushing out some poignant parallel that catches you off guard. And you can forgive a bit of angst in the disorienting world we live in today.
I wish I'd have had more patience, or sensitivity, or just more of the requisite life experiences to appreciate poetry earlier, and not be ashamed of trying to be more open to it. All those emotions and ideas and feelings pared brutally down to the bone, until only a handful of sounds and syllables and some highly distilled reflection remains.
Christopher Fry wrote: "Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement". That expresses poetry well, for me ... at least for the authors that seem to resonate with me and my own life experiences.
If you're like me and have an interest in learning to appreciate poetry, but have no real bearings on where to start, I'd recommend 'How to Read Poetry Like a Professor' by Thomas C. Foster. He has a wonderful, witty writing style, but was an enormous help to me learning how to read and appreciate poetry.
Ordered this set of translations from Wong May just now. I'm thoroughly grounded in the Western tradition, but definitely open to a nice mental image from anywhere, and the (rather Wordsworthian) line in the subject here has a nice feel to it.
