Poetry Reading

POETRY GROUP

Report for Fall, 2019, to Spring 2020

The Poetry Group resembles a book club; however, we read poems, miniature stories, instead of 500-page novels.  

• We discuss ways to appreciate individual poems, even if we don’t like them very much.
• We often discover that familiarity breeds affection.  
• We have read poems about music, love, nature, rain, grief, children, Christmas, sea shells, war, politics, humour, God, magic, agriculture, fish, beauty . . . 
• We have examined the familiar proposition that “If it doesn’t rhyme, it’s not poetry.”  There are so many fine poems that don’t rhyme, though, that the proposition is found to be leaky — Psalm 23 and The Lord’s Prayer are cases in point.
• We have learned to tell the difference between such forms as a sonnet and a ballad, a villanelle and blank verse, free verse and a limerick, a heroic couplet and an epic.
• We spend a lot of time discussing the difference between poetry and prose.
• We sometimes discuss such things as the poet’s family life, her religion, his politics, the century in which they lived.  Such information can make the reader more comfortable with a poem, but, surprisingly, these facts often add less than one might expect to understanding a poem’s meaning.
• We spend a lot of time rooting in the dictionary, looking for word origins, etymologies.  Poetry is all about Language.

• Most important, we listen to the questions, beliefs, and stories of our friends in the Group, because every person opens a different door to each poem.

Please join us, or just drop in for a visit.  We have only just begun the spring session.  You haven’t missed too much.

Ron Marken

Facilitator

For more information, please contact Ron Marken at 778-265-9949 or  tobnoz@mac.com