Making Coffee After Dark: A Class in Reading Poetry
We live in an age in which poetry is not so much disliked as utterly ignored. Collections of Robert Frost poems used to be best sellers; today poetry is relegated to inoffensive greetings on Hallmark cards. One could conclude poetry is dead. But, I think, that is premature. Poetry is, in my mind, as necessary and useful as a logical argument or a well-timed joke. Somehow our culture has misconstrued poetry as some distant relative that we must tolerate on special holidays, flamboyant perhaps, but utterly useless. We are going to try to get to know this “relative” better, side-stepping some misconceptions about her, removing some obstacles that stand in the way of seeing her more fully, and considering some strategies or tools that we can use to become more present to her when she walks into the room.