Red Rose: Love and Poetry

[binary_sunset]

Nothing in the Zinnia theme quite spoke to me, but I think just about everyone on the planet has some sort of relationship with red roses. Personally, I associate them with A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns, and it got me thinking about my relationship with poetry in general.

I first learned about this poem in A Child's Introduction to Poetry by Michael Driscoll (which is apparently absent from archive.org's collection! I will need to rectify this.) I had the 2003 edition linked here, but Black Dog & Leventhall  released a revised version in 2020. If it's even half as good as the version I grew up with, I think it would make a great gift for any literarily-inclined children in your life.

I was a bit of an odd duck as a child. But I was quickly labelled as "smart" because I was a voracious reader, even from a young age. I remember when I was in first grade (7 years old for those of you outside the US), my first grade teacher didn't actually have any books in her classroom that it took me longer than 20 minutes to read. At the time, first graders were limited to only reading picture books, levelled readers, and really simple chapter books (think Magic Treehouse and A to Z Mysteries) in the school library, and it annoys me to this day that they didn't encourage kids to challenge themselves. If a kid picks up Harry Potter and struggles with it, shouldn't we be encouraging them to ask an adult for help?

Anyway. I don't actually remember when I received this book. I do remember that it was a gift from my Bubbe and included a CD that I would sometimes listen to. It was formative enough that the illustrations in the book and the voices of the narrators are permanently burned into my mind. Side note: They anglicised poor Mr Burns's poem and had what's clearly and American actress read it. Which is... definitely a choice.

Regardless of when I got it, the collection ignited this life-long love of poetry. I remember, when we had to do poetry recitations in third grade (age 10), everyone else chose from the Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky books (no shade to either of them, for the record. Their poems are delightful) while I preformed The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. I wasn't trying to show off or anything, I just genuinely liked the poem. I didn't fully grok what was going on in it, but I knew that the narrator was sad about his dead girlfriend and the raven is taunting him and that was enough.

I was an English major in college, and I'm theoretically still pursuing that degree. (I had to drop out during the pandemic and things have been complicated since working full time). It's been very fun to kind of play I Spy with the authors I first learned about in that book. I still instinctively think of Keats as "the guy who wrote that really long vase poem" to this day.

I do still love poetry, but most of the stuff I'm reading lately are translations of older work (namely Lombardo's translation of The Metamorphoses and Anne Carson's translations of Sappho's Fragments). There are really only a few living poets who I can name off the top of my head (tumblr's darlings: Carson and Richard Siken). I also got to meet Marie Howe, who is the kindest woman I've ever met, though I don't own any of her books.

I extend the question to you. Do you like poetry? Who do you like to read? Is there anyone out there doing it like my favourite Dead White Boys?