Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Prose on Poetry

Many months ago on February 14th, Oregon had its 150th birthday. But when you're 150 years old, your birthday party lasts longer than a single day – all year, all around the state, folks have enjoyed celebrating our state's history, reflecting on its future, and bringing the word "sesquicentennial" more fully into our vocabulary. Poetry Northwest magazine and the Oregon State Library are doing their part; they've compiled a list of 150 outstanding Oregon poetry books for our enjoyment and edification. So I'll take this as an opportunity to do a little poetry celebrating too!

A few years ago I realized that not only did I rarely read poetry, I had no idea how formal English verse structure worked, and had never really tried my hand at writing poems myself. To resolve these problems, I turned to The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, by actor, novelist, comedian, director and also poet Stephen Fry. The book is an instruction manual for poetry-writing, and it is a sincere and careful text, introducing readers to meter, rhyme, and verse forms with a series of explanatory chapters and instructive exercises, illustrated along the way with numerous examples of both excellent and execrable verse. Fry's descriptive and instructional style is logical, helpful, and clear – but at the same time, his famous wry wit is decidedly present. The book should be enjoyable to all who wish to understand poetic structures better, as well as to those who want to write and those who enjoy a bit of humor while they learn.

If you're more fascinated with the process of poetry than you are with writing it yourself, you might be interested in Abigail Friedman's story. Her book The Haiku Apprentice: Memoirs of Writing Poetry in Japan chronicles her personal journey exploring the form of haiku and discovering the world of people devoted to the haiku life, while continuing to attend to her family and her day job as an American diplomat in Tokyo. Why is the book worth reading?  Friedman's account of her exploration of a specific piece of Japanese culture is interesting, for sure; but beyond that, The Haiku Apprentice introduces readers to the beauty and precision of the Japanese language, and to the intriguing spiritual aspects of the practice of reading, writing, and enjoying haiku.

I said up above that although I don't, as a rule, enjoy reading poetry, I do like to hear it read or performed. I am not alone here – spoken word poetry has experienced a revival in the United States in the last twenty years in the form of the poetry slam. It's a very democratic sport, and the rules are simple: poets sign up to compete, they must perform original work, they can't use costumes or props, and they get three minutes. Judges are picked from the audience more or less at random, and they score each performance. That's it. If you want to see and hear how this works but don't know where the best local venue is, take a look at the film Slamnation: The Art of Spoken Word, directed by Paul Devlin. It's a profile of the 1996 New York City slam team as it makes its way to the national contest right here in the Rose City.