“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” — T.S. Eliot
Childhood violin + unsolicited advice (Issue #298)
Next Tuesday marks the beginning of National Poetry Month here in the U.S., a holi-month that began in 1996, when the Academy of American Poets gathered a group of publishers and poetry lovers to strategize about how they might raise poetry’s profile in culture. One of their first initiatives involved giving away 100K books of poetry to libraries, schools, and bookstores — they also partnered with Amtrak to place paperback anthologies of love poems on passengers’ seats. (I’d like to time-travel back to 1997 to pick up one of those.)
With that in mind, I’m sharing a story about poetry (and a love poem of sorts) that I found in the Medium archive: Michele Sharpe’s archival guide to how she taught poetry to college students. Sharpe shares a single poem — “My Papa’s Waltz,” by former U.S. Poet Laureate Theodore Roethke — and explains why her students debated endlessly over its meaning. The poem begins like this:
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy…
Sharpe’s students argued about whether it depicted an abusive or supportive relationship. (Words like “waltzing” and “romped” convey joy; words like “battered” and “death” imply the opposite… you’ll see if you read the full poem.) As Sharpe’s students disagreed over the poem’s meaning, they eventually stumbled upon poetry’s real lesson: words can have opposing meanings depending on context, and a poem’s job (or one of them) is to highlight the friction between them.
“Human beings are usually not one thing or another, wholly evil or wholly good,” Sharpe writes. “Complexity. Poetry can sing about that to us. All we have to do is pay attention to the words.”
If you have time this weekend, browse the Poetry topic page to find verses that deepen your understanding of language (here’s one, featured recently in this newsletter, that stuck with me; I also recommend Scribe, a poetry publication on Medium). And, if you want to write a poem of your own? Here are a few pointers from Mary Oliver, via Kera Hollow: “The poem is not a discussion, not a lecture, but an instance — an instance of attention, of noticing something in the world.”
🎻 Also today…
- A writer thinks back on the joys of learning violin as a child (and the sorrows of giving it up as an adult), specifically “the rare occasions when technique and emotion aligned perfectly, when the violin felt less like an instrument and more like a particularly expressive limb…” (Eutaktos)
- Veteran Chief Technology Officer and author of The Manager’s Path, Camille Fournier, reflects on a decade of defining career ladders for engineers: “You should not try to create a ladder that functions as a pure checklist or scorecard that guarantees promotion if people check enough boxes; promotions are as much about the needs of the organization as the skills of the employees.”
☝ A dose of practical wisdom
Never give unsolicited advice. Just ask: “Can I give you some advice?” first. (Jane Cobbald)
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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