Poetry

"As a child my mother and father read to me the works of the great poets of the world. I remember listening to the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam and The Song of Hiawatha, as well as various works by other great writers. Longfellow, Robert Frost, Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and Robert W. Service were some of the poets read in our home. As a teenager and young adult I discovered others who captured my imagination, Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Leonard Cohen, William Butler Yeats and Robert Burns . All these writers gave me a love of words and a love of the sounds, the images, the rhythm of poetry.

I believe such a love is a learned thing. I read books to my children, not poetry. My son loves to read books but doesn't appreciate poetry. I think, like classical music, you need to be immersed in poetry from an early age to understand and appreciate it.

Like most teenagers, I wrote poetry, that soppy, sentimental stuff that seems to pour out of young people with no difficulty. Now I would love to be able to put down my thoughts so easily, without spending hours searching for just the right word, the phrase that speaks volumns, the sentence that says so perfectly everything that needs to be said, that paints a picture that cannot be forgotten. I would pour out my soul in rhyme for you to read," I whisper.

Are you listening?