Ordinary Day

This topic, or one close to it, has been on my mind lately because I'm teaching a lot of poetry right now. And for me, poetry has long been as accessible as prose. I've wondered, honestly, how much my musical background (I played violin briefly in elementary school before they said I was missing too much class time with that and gifted; then I sang in a youth choir through the rest of elementary and middle school; I joined band in middle school and played all the way through high school. I don't play now, but I dabbled with both choir and an instrument in college just for fun.) has affected the way I relate to poetry. To me, the idea that the sound and cadence of language is just as important, if not more, than how it looks on the page is spectacularly obvious. While there are aspects of poetry that are hard for me, there are others that feel deeply intuitive. I wonder, though, if what feels intuitive is just something that's drawing on skill sets from music that I may not be consciously aware of. I've more than once thought about the meter of poetry as being like the beat of a song. I can't read a poem off its meter any more than I could walk on the up beats to a song instead of the downbeats.

I know that that's not strictly a foreign language thing, but I suspect a lot of people see poetry as just as hard to make sense of as an unfamiliar language, so I thought I'd toss it out there.