Do I dare to eat a peach?

Ok.  Well I tried to post this once and then the internet stole my words! How rude. Ahem.  Moving on.  Apologies for anyone who read this while it was just a title.

So the title is a line from this poem called The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot.  It is a very long poem with beautiful meter that flows fantastically.  And what a line! In fact I recommend you listen to a reading of it right now.  It’s quite long.

So the reason I’m quoting this poem is because I’ve just watched a film called Kill Your Darlings.  This is a film about a completely different poet called Allen Ginsberg and how his intellectual and passionate blooming entwines with the creation of the Beat movement.  I highly recommend it to anyone.

But it got me thinking about poetry.  About words and stories and sounds and experiences.   I like poetry.  Mostly this has come from an angsty few years at university where the best way to cope with my emotional confusion was to write.  Hey it’s cheaper than therapy.  But the thing is I never learnt to write poetry.  I never learnt about rhyme and meter and the difference between a sonnet and a haiku.  I never even learned how to read poetry properly.

This is a pet peeve of mine.   Thousands of people of similar age to me in the UK suffered through poetry at GCSE by being given an anthology, told to read a poem, in silence, and then dissect every line of the poem for meaning whilst completely failing to appreciate the poem as a whole.   This picture is a good summation of my English lessons (apologies for the swearing!)


But now that I have even the shallowest skim understanding of things like meter and caesuras, I can actually enjoy reading a poem.  I can read it out loud the way they are most often meant to be and appreciate the sound of the poem as well the experience.    I would like to read more poetry.  I don’t really know any poets so at this stage it’s pretty much just a random search to see what sticks… far one.  But that is better than none. 🙂

Umm…the end…..quick Rachel try and get to a point!

Poetry is a beautiful art medium.  I’m glad that I can start to appreciate it properly now.  Here’s to exploring the world.