Hhhhm, maybe so,,,, I know that touching peoples lives can be a very
rewarding experience.    It really is about how they are touched and does it
make their life better or worse.   I know that people will take the same
words and thoughts and come away with a different experience and apply what
has been said to their lives in different ways.     Its like teaching Sunday
school.  The teacher learns the most from what takes place and if a child
applies just a small part of what has been said to their lives,,,,, to
understand and see what is taking place in their life is the greatest reward
of all.   It must be the same way a teacher in school feels when they see
what takes place in a students life.   So it goes.
Harv

harv, i think you meant to say that only late in life have YOU become
smart enough to enjoy the depth of words used in poetry, but I read
your sentence to mean that only late in life do any of us have the
capacity to enjoy poetry. that resonated for me, because i really
loathed poetry until the last decade or so. i'm always amazed at young
people who truly "get it," and at my partner, john, who can still
recite word for word poetry he learned and treasured in high school.
but like so much in life, it takes on a different meaning with age. i
feel lucky, as you do, to finally be able to appreciate and find
meaning in poetry.

and kate, i printed out the bessie stanley poem for my bulletin board.
thanks for sharing.

diane

you're welcome, diane.

now you have me thinking and recalling, diane.  trying to understand
something and thinking aloud on the screen.  y'know, i seriously loathed and
utterly avoided reading throughout much of elementary school, because it was
so tediously difficult for me; reading made no sense to me.  i simply
couldn't connect to it.  loved math (and music which i had a little knack
for, and loved most everything else), because i could see math was
practical/applicable and it made sense to me.  i think math simply came
easily to me and i could see math in everything and everybody around me.
heck, i reduced almost everything in my life to math.

it wasn't until my elder sister was studying shakespeare and shared it with
me, that my reading anything made any sense at all to me.  i'm thinking back
. . . i think what made the difference was that i could hear shakespeare's
musical voice in his words (or was that the math in his voice and in his
poetry?).  i couldn't make that connection to what felt like disembodied and
unconnected words in essays, textbooks, novels and such.  there are still
books, that when i read them, if i can't find/settle on the author's voice
(or the author severely breaks the character's voice or breaks narrative
voice) i struggle with them.  then, i have to re-read paragraphs, sometimes
several times to comprehend (i read far more prose than poetry).  must be a
"the way some minds work" kind of thing?

did you mean you thought harv meant, "smart enough to value it enough to
enjoy it" or "aware enough to appreciate its value" or what?  i'm confused,
cuz i was still comprehending what you wrote the way i first read harv's
statement, like he didn't believe he was intelligent enough and i knew he
was (cuz i know people way far less intelligent than you or harv, who are
very in tune with poetry).  i mean the first part you wrote, not the
capacity part.  i got that part, which triggered what i wrote about when i
was a child (meaning and reduced to, i didn't have the capacity for prose,
apparently).

in tune!  hear it!  ear! aha!  it takes an ear, not necessarily being smart
to enjoy poetry!  maybe an ear has to be tuned-in for poetry, like it has to
be for singing a piece of music.  maybe?  i just now remembered how it was
drummed into our english majors' heads, by college profs, that most poetry
is meant to be read aloud, with the exception of visual poems (that's
visual, as in layout on the page, not imagery).  sorry for blathering so
much.

kate

Oh my,,,,  I meant as it applies to myself,,,, not everyone else.   I get
shown everyday how stupid I am and how I should of done better when I was
much younger.   :-)  thanks for your thoughts.
Harv