This is a once a month event organized by Lu and Kelly to entice us into reading and writing about poetry. While I have been reading several collections over the last few weeks, I decided to write about hearing poetry out loud.
Hearing poetry live is what brought me back to it after a long separation. One way to experience this is to visit a near-by poetry festival. There will be some good poets and some not-so-good ones, but you will be able to enjoy poetry the way most poets mean it to be experienced, as a spoken thing, like music or bird song. You can check your local calendar listings, schools, public venues and bookstore often have author readings, some of them by poets.
There is a great selection of poetry in audio format, either at your local library or available over the internet, but it is a different thing listening along in a room filled with other people. Listening to and talking about poetry with a group opens me up to different interpretations, different ideas about the words, their meaning and how they are strung together. The shared experience brings me back to a time before the written word, when news and stories were carried from town to town by travelers, some news spoken, some stories sung.
Here is link to a festival I would have loved to go to if I had been in Washington, D.C. this past weekend.
Thanks to Lu and Kelly for organizing Poetry:Read More, Blog More.
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Just like Shakespeare makes more sense to me when I see it performed, I think the same is true of poetry.
So true Jenners – Some poems come alive for me whne I hear them out loud. I haven’t actually read much Shakespeare unless you count high school and my first years in college (which were a long time ago!) but hope to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Once Upon A Time challenge.
That’s one of the things I miss about college towns. When I was in school there were always writers & poets coming for readings, and I was often surprised at how different the poems seemed when I heard them read out loud. I don’t know if it was just hearing them read out loud, or hearing them read by the author. And I don’t care. It was still great.
I know. I often find myself touched deeply hearing poems read out loud. More so than reading them to myself:)
Poetry is a minstrel art
should not be locked in books
but sung, spoken, barked
regardless of the looks
poetry is reportage
news from the war zone
carrying with it all those scars
revealed back to the bone
poetry is the silent’s voice
should not be by vellum bound
the words are there to be rejoiced
so stand up, make that sound
Thanks for this!