So many people are denied the deep gratification of poetry. Their educations have trained them to read for information. When I told my uncle that a book of my poems had been published, he said, “Poety is Greek to me.” He did not open the pristine white covers of my first book. The same pople who play the cello, pilot planes, design software, and teach astronomy assume that poetry is difficult. Or the thudding rhyme or banal haiku of the “poetry unit” assured them that poetry is irrelevant. So easy it is to forget how to play. As children, we enter the spirit of make believe and accept temporary worlds. We pretend we are pioneers or explorers; we follow our imaginations. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called this process the “willing suspension of disbelief.” As adults, we sometimes abandon this talent. Yet we still enter temporary worlds when we yell at a soccer game or swim meet, cry or applaud at a play, or get carried away by a friend’s story. For a while we forget the immediacy of ourselves and go with the witnessed experience. Like play, poetry lets us enter other territories.

Why did no one ever hand my uncle a direct poem such as Jane Kenyon’s four-line “The Sandy Hole”—a brief and brutally accurate captured moment?

The Sandy Hole
(Jane Kenyon, 1947–1995)

The infant’s coffin no bigger than a flightbag …
The young father steps backward from the sandy hole,
eyes wide and dry, his hand over his mouth.
No one dares to come near him, even to touch his sleeve.

Something is named. Something is noticed. The words are spare and plain. Isolated on a white page, the poem seems to float in the white silence around it. This is how a poem comes to the border between the speakable and the unspeakable.

—Frances Mayes

Transcribed by me from pages xiii – xiv from The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems, © 2001 Harcourt, Inc.

Tweet: Poetry captures a moment—no camera needed.
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