Breathe-In Experience, Breathe-Out Poetry

Last night while sitting in the living room we were having a normal Sunday evening. We'd all gone to church, eaten dinner, had our home teachers over, visited Grandma and Grandpa Harman, and had a family council (when we plan our week). As we sat in the living room the usual Sunday necessitates bed time. My family all goes to bed at 9:00 pm so with a family prayer and kisses and hugs and "I love you, good nights" we all head to bed. But this night was different, for the next day was Memorial Day and no one had school. So how did we spend our precious and new-found hours? We read poetry.

My Dad, actually, was the one who initiated the poetry reading. With our entire family, all seven of us together and returned to visit from college, sitting close so we could hear my Dad began to read out of his old leather-covered poetry book. They've always been two of my favorite books. Covered in stretched and hand stitched leather, it's embossed with floral patterns and my Dad's initials B.T.H. I actually loved these books so much my Grandma Harman went out and found me the same two books at a garage sale and bought them for me. They're very old, one from 1927 and the other from 1951. They have the smell of years in the pages, a smell I can't quite describe, and the pages are yellowed with edges worn to the softness of fleece. I too have covered them with hand-stitched and hand-carved leather to help save the breaking bindings and follow in my Father's footsteps.

What is it about poetry that has touched me so? In the past year, I've realized that my love of poetry is not entirely self-made. Perhaps an innate love was born in me somewhere, but a realized passion has been molded by the hours of my Daddy reading to us. Reading of tales of bravery and patriotism, quips of cleverness, and traditional orations with the coming holidays. I've long since cherished the tenderness of his voice as he sheds a tear and chokes back raw emotion as he reads of the goodness of men, of what we'd all like to be, and the words that we all understand.

This has begun a tradition for me. Without even comprehending the trend I've found that the men in my life have all read me poetry. The men most dear to my heart have at least one thing in common, they read to me. My Daddy on a Sunday Evening or a holiday, for every special number in Family Home Evening, and sometimes just because. Upon coming home from college Tanner sat me down and read me his favorite poetry from J.R.R. Tolkien. He has since begun to write poetry and will often come to me with questions of diction and rhythm. And it's truly beautiful poetry, poetry I wouldn't expect from a twelve-year-old. Even Jason will sit me down and read me his precious books he carries everywhere and sleeps with. And I fall in love all over again every time Spencer reads to me. Rudyard Kipling, The Little Prince, or Linden Hills. I remember one of my favorite dates we were sitting in the lobby of my building and he pulled out his book of poems and poems he'd written on his mission and he read to me for the next hour or two. Perhaps it's true, at least for me, that poetry is the fruit of love.

From a random person who I don't know I found this statement on poetry, "In the code language of criticism when a poem is said to be about poetry the word "poetry" is often used to mean: how people construct an intelligibility out of the randomness they experience; how people choose what they love; how people integrate loss and gain; how they distort experience by wish and dream; how they perceive and consolidate flashes of harmony; how they (to end a list otherwise endless) achieve what Keats called a "Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity."

In not so many words, Wadsworth described poetry as, "the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion." And Muriel Rukeyser, a modern female poet, famous for her poem "To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century" said, "Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry."

Perhaps this is why I love poetry. It gives understanding and meaning to all experience and captures the passion all can relate too. For sharing with me this love of poetry I will be forever grateful to the men in my life, my Daddy, Tanner, Jason, and Spencer.

Now for my favorite poems...there are too many so here are just a . . . few. ;)

*The Highway Man (Alfred Noyes)  *The Lady of Shalott (Lord Alfred Tennyson) *Sonnet 116 (William Shakespeare) *When I Have Fears (John Keats) *Apostrophe to the Ocean (Lord Byron) *Annabelle Lee (Edgar Allen Poe) *The Raven (Edgar Allen Poe) *O Captain, My Captain (Walt Whitman) *Horatius (Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay) *The Wreck of the Hesperus (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) *Bright Star (John Keats) *Ode to the West Wind (Percy Bysshe Shelly) *Ode on a Grecian Urn (John Keats) *Ode to Autumn (John Keats) *Sonnet 130 (William Shakespeare) *The House by the Side of the Road (Sam Walter Foss) *Mother o' Mine (Rudyard Kipling) *Somebody's Mother (Mary D. Brine) *Somebody's Darling (Anonymous) *The Gettysburg Address (Abraham Lincoln) *The Crisis (Thomas Paine) *The Preamble (Thomas Jefferson) *The Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson) [especially second paragraph] *Holy Sonnet X (John Donne) *The Bait (John Donne) *To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century (Muriel Rukeyser) *Invitation/I Don't Care (I don't know, Spencer might, since I first heard it from him) *The Road Not Taken (Robert Frost) *Still I Rise (Maya Angelou) *Landscape with Yellow Birds (Shuntaro Tanikawa) *Mezzo Cammin (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) *Forgetfulness (Billy Collins)

-Natalie Cherie