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I write – well scribble at – poetry and I have trouble listening to it or reading it sometimes. True confession. Until I get in the groove, getting into the groove can be hard. Listening can be difficult. Reading with comprehension takes time.

Maybe I am fighting myself, working too hard. Maybe I have more to learn. Maybe I need to relax.

It’s easy to write relax into poetry – that line is a bit poetic – but relaxing can be a struggle without a guide.

Maybe reading, period, much less reading poetry, is hard as we approach the third decade of the 21st century. True reading includes absorbing the information, reflecting on it, at times debating or disputing it before finally making sense of it for myself. Skimming doesn’t get me there. But who has time to ponder?

And then poetry is literature, art even. What to do with a very long poem that near the end has this:

“It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”?

The lines seem an indictment of poetry: 1. News is not in poems. 2. People suffer hard deaths from not finding news in poems.

Poems don’t seem to have much use: no news, poetry doesn’t prevent people from miserable deaths.

But the lines before these famous lines are these:

“Look at / what passes for the new. / You will not find it there but in / despised poems.”

So, it is not news but the new that we find in “despised” poems, of all things. Poems that are new and thus unfamiliar, are despised, perhaps because meaning must be wrestled from them.

The poet is William Carlos Williams and the poem is “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” Whether or not that is too much information, I am going to stop.

See you Saturday in Maple Hall.