January 2025

A Poetry Gathering: Liberating Experiences Available

In 1870, Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry... Is there any other way?” Thanks to the initiative of Villager Jim Hendrick, invitations to start a new small group gathering were sent out early this year.  As Jim had hoped, those who responded have enjoyed the kind of poems that affected Emily Dickinson so deeply.

You might ask how a typical meeting is conducted. Members bring one or two poems that they have selected, and Jim, as the organizer, asks who would like to begin. After the first volunteer reads his/her selection out loud, there is a brief silence, and then the reader and other participants offer their reactions and commentary. Participants continue this procedure until the meeting is finished.

Do you have to write poems to join? Although a few published poets attend the meetings, and a number of Villagers bring their own work to share, there is no requirement of being a writer. 

Must you have studied poetry extensively? Elementary and high school teachers, and university professors of poetry and English literature attend the meetings, and their insights about the structure and meaning of the poems are invaluable. But all are welcome, no matter how limited their prior experience.

Are you expected to always join in the discussion? No, even if you only want to listen, that’s perfectly acceptable.

Finally, would this experience be of any use to someone with a more technical background, like an engineer? I received a minor in electrical engineering and worked as a summer intern at Rohr Corporation, an aerospace firm in Chula Vista, California. I still laugh at the joke that, when engineers are asked for their reaction to a glass half full (or half empty) of water, they respond that it has a design flaw (it’s twice a big as it needs to be). In my early 20s, I would have considered a poetry group an utter waste of time and energy.

Now that I’m retired, I’m grateful that I joined this small gathering. Although every poem isn’t as liberating an experience as Emily Dickinson’s, I can say that the poems shared in our monthly gathering have often awakened the strangest memories, feelings, laughter and tears, even in an engineering type like myself.

It’s a simple blessing to notice poets’ revelations of beauty and meaning hidden in the ordinary events of human life. Here is an example of such an unveiling, an ancient haiku, which Jim Hendrick shared recently with the group:

“The Old Pond” by Matsuo Bashō

An old silent pond

A frog jumps into the pond—

Splash! Silence again.

I can approach topics I would rather ignore, like mortality, when I read the work of poets as insightful as Bashō.