return to poetry

poetry has been coming up a lot recently.

this past weekend i went to a wedding in which a neruda poem was read in both english and spanish during the service. i had forgotten how much i loved reading neruda's poems as a teenager. certain ones i had read so many times that i had unknowingly committed them to memory - puedo escribir los versos mas tristes esta noche...

it was from that same time that i also remember the poet, billy collins coming to share some of his work at my high school. when a student asked what the meaning behind a particular poem was, collins responded that the meaning of a poem was like the scaffold of a building - only necessary in the construction. once completed, both the building and the poem stood independently. (that was the hope anyway).

i loved that idea and found it to be very meaningful when studying dance several years later. one of the most salient differences i find between the art of making dance and the art of writing poetry, is that while both require study, the dancer learns a whole new vocabulary (movement) to show us something we could not have otherwise seen. the poet, on the other hand, utilizes a vocabulary that all of us know (words) and somehow still manages to show us something we would otherwise not have been able to see.