Speaking of poetry
When I posted about the Favorite Poem Project earlier in the month, I learned about the videos, or “mini-documentaries” that were made along with the third book of the series Invitation to Poetry. Then I discovered that you can watch many of the videos online. They are amazing and addictive and bring home the fact that poetry should be read aloud, memorized, listened to, that it needs to be heard. These videos are especially powerful because each chosen poem is given context by the meaning it has to the person reading it. A brilliant synergy results: the poem gives us insight into the speaker’s life, even as his or her interpretation of it reveals more about the poem to us. For instance, John Ashberry’s poem The Improvement gained immensely for me by the speaker’s understanding of it. I’ve never been able to ‘crack’ Ashberry; I just don’t get him. But then a stranger with his intense appreciation of Ashberry shed a light for me to see more into the poet’s work that I ever had before. In the future, I know I will read Ashberry’s poems in a different way.
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