Poetry is a form of enchantment.
True poems unlock, disintegrate, and rebuild you. Sweet incantations, made of spelling, that focus the imagination and evoke your emotions. But they must be read aloud.
A poem is an oral work of art. Hearing it is the only way to engage sounds and rhythms, carefully composed by the author, that the mind cannot emulate. Hearing it aloud moves you from a cerebral experience to an emotional one; it is like the difference between seeing a plate of food, and eating it.
Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself with this famous piece by Mary Oliver.
–
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
13 October 2024
