Poetry

I'm not one for poetry, really.  I'm not sure why.  I guess out of all types of poetry I am the most receptive to prose that is written in a poetic way, if that makes sense.  For example, when I was in undergrad, I took an environmental studies course in which we had to read a book called Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, a Woman, and the Wild by Renee Askins.  It was the way I felt when I read it that I really enjoyed.  Here's an example passage:

"That's how the summer evenings of my early childhood passed, our Volkswagon parked alongside some meadow, with its nose edged into the tall summer grass like a huge Lab sniffing the dirt, with my mama counting the deer.  It's also how I learned to count, but for years I would be confused about what numbers really followed others because my mother's voice would drift off at fourteen or thirty-seven, like the sun slipping behind a darkened cloud into some secret shadowed place that concealed the loneliness of a young mother, and then suddenly her voice would reemerge brilliant and warm on twenty-six or forty-three.  I doubt that it mattered to her how many deer there were, the numbers were only a mantra to give order to the loneliness, to arrange an eternal evening according to a knowable rhythm.  Occassionally she would remark on how large a dawn had gotten, or on the limp od a doe, but mostly she would just count, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty... and the light would fall and her voice would trail off and the deer would slip back into the shadows."


In any case, tonight I am going to be seeing a poet with a friend of mine.  His name is Billy Collins, and I don't really know anything about him.  But, I did find at least one poem that I liked that I will share with you.  It's called "I Go Back To The House For A Book."


"I turn around on the gravel and go back to the house for a book, something to read at the doctor's office, and while I am inside, running the finger of inquisition along a shelf, another me that did not bother to go back to the house for a book heads out on his own, rolls down the driveway, and swings left towards town, a ghost in his ghost car, another knot in the string of time, a good three minutes ahead of me- a spacing that will now continue for the rest of my life."


 I hope it will be a good show.  What are your opinions on poetry?
Song of the day: Fleetwood Mac - Go Your Own Way