December 15, 2010--An article in The Sun...

I just started reading my latest issue of The Sun today. For those who don't know, The Sun is a totally ad-free magazine  published and edited by Sy Safransky. Full of thought-provoking articles, letters, essays, and poems, The Sun is one of the few magazines I read faithfully cover to cover. There's usually good stuff in it all the way through.
The December issue is a case in point. I just started it today and already am amazed at the thoughts beginning to swirl in my own brain as I read the article, "Written on the Bones: Kim Rosen on Reclaiming the Ancient Power of Poetry." Rosen talks about how poetry is like music, is a "sacred, mind-altering substance: you take it into your system, and it carries you beyond your ordinary ways of thinking....Like a shaman's drum, the beat of a poem can literally entrain the rhythms of your body: your heartbeat, your breath, even your brain waves, altering consciousness." I love this as a concept as lately poetry has been a love/hate relationship for me. I love to write it, but hate to read it as so often I just don't get what it is the poet is trying to say. Maybe I don't have to get it in the logical sense, but can just feel the energy of the poem in my body instead.
For years, writing poetry was  a joy for me, one of those activities where time and my surroundings slipped away for hours at a time. Then, I started taking classes in writing poetry and began to hate it; having to pay strict attention to meter, rhythm, word choice--suddenly poetry was work, didn't come easily at all and I felt my natural sense of rhythm disappear under the endless guidelines I was supposed to adhere to. So, I stopped writing poetry except for the mandatory ones for class and outside of class assignments,  stopped reading it, too.
Now, I am out of class, free to read and write what I want. Reading this article on poetry stirs a desire inside me again to go back to this form, try my hand at it again. So what if I am the only one who sways to its beat; at least I know I am alive and well. And maybe, I will return to the poetry of others and not feel so stressed to understand the poems in a logical way but will let my senses guide me.