TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

I love poetry. Of course I do—I’m hosting this show every weekday! And you’re here, listening, so I think we have this love of poetry in common. But I also know people who are a little uneasy with poetry. I’ve met plenty of people who’ve confessed to me, “I love to read, but I don’t get poetry.” Or they might simply say, “I’m not a poetry person.”

Believe it or not, I understand. I think most of us grow up telling stories, and reading stories, so narrative becomes second nature, but somehow poetry feels trickier—more difficult, more challenging, less accessible. I think this may be in part because of how we first encounter poetry. We may have learned nursery rhymes as small children, and we may have read Shel Silverstein or other fun poems in elementary school, but our first formal education in poetry is often in high school. In many schools, this still entails reading poems from the canon—the classics—and explicating them: discussing the literary devices used by the authors, and explaining what the poems mean. 

Listen, I love poetry, and I’ll be honest: that wouldn’t have excited teenage me. Teenage me wanted to read Sylvia Plath and Nikki Giovanni and Donald Hall and Charles Simic. I wanted to read those poems and highlight my favorite lines, the way I would do with my favorite songs. 

Sometimes I wish we could engage with poetry the way we engage with music. When I listen to a song or a record, I’m not trying to figure out what it means. I’m not preparing an argument or gathering evidence. I’m not doing a post mortem on techniques. I’m having a pleasurable experience with someone else’s art—letting the sounds wash over me and gleaning what I can from it. Maybe a lyric jumps out at me, maybe a melody or harmony, maybe some instrumentation. 

My point is that I can love a song without fully “getting” it. And thankfully, there’s not going to be a quiz! We can engage with poems like this, too, especially outside of the classroom. We can read, and listen, for pleasure. We can allow ourselves to be moved and changed. 

Today’s poem feels to me like an invitation INTO poetry, into a space where the reader, or listener, can move freely. I hope you find yourself welcome.

ars poetica, 2019
by Airea D. Matthews

a woman who doesn’t read             many poems asks                              is poetry meant to be

inaccessible        if she’s supposed to feel                                   caught in a thicket

without a boned shiv                               to free herself and          no one near enough

to offer their blade                      trapped in the tangle                     as language vines

her neck                 to choke her out                or fold her weary           from all the sensory

wrestling                I tell her absent sight                              sound serves         touch matters

that she might bend                                 bramble away                          move to the quiet clearing
 
                                                          every poem has them

pockets of air                                                                                                     where lightning twice strikes

"ars poetica, 2019" by Airea D. Matthews. Used by permission of the poet.