Falling In Love With Poetry
Monica Kidd - Ground-Truthing
It is all there, everything, / first daylight, last,
In another life, I am a poet. Poetry is the spinster aunt of literature. The path to story beaten down by her fraught and earnest twin sisters, fiction and non-fiction, poetry is at liberty to tease, to embroider, to misquote; to plead, to adorn, to deface. Poetry is the hobgoblin of literature, full of shape-shifting devilment. Poetry frightens. “I liked your poems the best,” my distressed father-in-law-to-be once confided after attending a reading in Toronto. I had read a series of narrative poems based on news stories; some of the poets who followed me were rather more experimental. “At least I understood what you were talking about.” Poetry contorts and vandalizes. It mutters to itself and speaks in tongues. But poetry also has the capacity to speak the barest truths. Listen to Joanne Page, in “Kite,” the poem that opens her tender and tragic collection Persuasion for a Mathematician:
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Lie down in unfenced prairie,
look at the sky.
It is all there, everything,
first daylight, last,
and when you look back,
its blue will be the most raw, fullest,
nothing like a dream.
I grew up in rural Alberta; my childhood took place in the centre of that stanza. I have lain in the tall grass of the unfenced prairie, my sun-bleached hair the colour of wheat, the mechanical buzz of grasshoppers in my eight year-old ears, straining for the sounds of other children’s voices in the distance. Up for early morning bus rides, I have watched the first daylight and, after an evening of baseball or planting potatoes, the last, cross-fading to northern lights. I know that raw and fullest blue. It has pulled me back and forth across a continent. I grope for it instinctively, as one reaches for a phantom leg.
