On reading poetry...

I’m currently in an acting class on zoom on Tuesday evenings. Among other things, we are asked to bring a new poem every week to class to read as a monologue aloud as a way to ‘warm up emotional intimacy’. 

When I first found out this was an assignment in the class, I did want any emotionally avoidant student with a heavy bend towards perfectionism might: I dutifully picked out a poem every week that seemed like it was the “right length” and “right amount of emotional vulnerability” and then I’d bring it class and read it in the ‘right way’ - clear, quiet, crisp — with a lilt and a musicality to bring out the artistry of the rhymes and rhythms.

And yet, many weeks, I’d get prompted - admit your faults, expose your deepest fears, be more in love. Week to week, I’d differ on my reactions to those prompts. Most weeks I would feel myself tighten, my speech get more pushed, and I’d do my best to muscle through and go through the motions of what ‘going deeper’ might look like - perhaps softening my diction, quieting my voice, speaking with an irregular speech pattern to show where I was ‘getting emotional’. 

Other weeks, I would “go deeper” and end up being a complete mess and crying through the majority of the poem. I would purposefully scan my brain and conjure images of my most troubling anxieties, some of the darkest moments I can remember, and the poem became clouded with deep sadness and emotion but it wasn’t present, it wasn’t vulnerable, it wasn’t really intimate. It wasn’t touching what the poem was describing, it wasn’t specific. It was just generalized emotion on top of words. 

And then one morning, I was drinking coffee with my husband on our porch and he got up to take a phone call. I decided, now would be a great time to find a poem to read in my acting class this week, so I hop onto instagram and pull up an account “@poetryisnotaluxury”. I found several poems by Ada Limon, the 2022 Poet Laureate of the US. My husband returns to the porch and I ask him if he wants to help me pick a poem from class. So, we begin reading aloud to one another and after one or two poems, I stumble across “The Great Blue Heron of Dunbar Road”. 

I started off as I typically do reading poems in class — with a natural bounce and one level removed from the emotional the poem is trying to evoke. But, soon, I become drawn into the story of the poem and images from the text conjure so clearly in my mind that I see myself inside of these words, it is so beautifully expressing exact things I have felt. I remember beginning to tear up about half way through the poem and looking at my husband and saying “Oh, this is really getting to me”. 

I then I realize: here I am — admitting my own mistakes, exposing my deepest fears. And I couldn’t be more in love. 

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The Great Blue Heron of Dunbar Road by Ada Limon

That we might walk out into the woods together,

and afterwards make toast
in our sock feet, still damp from the fern’s
wet grasp, the spiky needles stuck to our
legs, that’s all I wanted, the dog in the mix,
jam sometimes, but not always. But somehow,
I’ve stopped praising you. How the valley
when you first see it—the small roads back
to your youth—is so painfully pretty at first,
then, after a month of black coffee, it’s just
another place your bullish brain exists, bothered
by itself and how hurtful human life can be.
Isn’t that how it is? You wake up some days
full of crow and shine, and then someone
has put engine coolant in the medicine
on another continent and not even crying
helps cure the idea of purposeful poison.
What kind of woman am I? What kind of man?
I’m thinking of the way my stepdad got sober,
how he never told us, just stopped drinking
and sat for a long time in the low folding chair
on the Bermuda grass reading and sometimes
soaking up the sun like he was the story’s only
subject. When he drove me to school, we decided
it would be a good day, if we saw the blue heron
in the algae-covered pond next to the road,
so that if we didn’t see it, I’d be upset. Then,
he began to lie. To tell me he’d seen it when
he hadn’t, or to suppose that it had just
taken off when we rounded the corner in
the gray car that somehow still ran, and I
would lie, too, for him. I’d say I saw it.
Heard the whoosh of wings over us.
That’s the real truth. What we told each other
to help us through the day: the great blue heron
was there, even when the pond dried up,
or froze over; it was there because it had to be.
Just now, I felt like I wanted to be alone
for a long time, in a folding chair on the lawn
with all my private agonies, but then I saw you
and the way you’re hunching over your work
like a puzzle, and I think even if I fail at everything,
I still want to point out the heron like I was taught,
still want to slow the car down to see the thing
that makes it all better, the invisible gift,
what we see when we stare long enough into nothing.