I just had an Aha! moment:  the daily email from Writer’s Almanac ended with this George Eliot quote:

So that’s where she got the title of her book!  She is Suzanne U. Clark and her book is entitled The Roar on the Other Side, A Guide for Student Poets.  And it’s one of those wonderful books that I dipped into when it first arrived and one of those wonderful books which eventually was left languishing on my shelf.  [Janie, we’re doing a Winter Reading Challenge, right?  This book will be on my list.]

How do you feel about poetry?  My father loved poetry, absolutely adored it.  When he was dying of pancreatic cancer, one of his students visited him in the hospital and they exchanged lines of poetry in the fashion of Marianne and Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility.  

I’ve been lukewarm about poetry until about ten years ago.  Now the reading of a poem is part of our daily morning routine.  We’ve read our way through a few anthologies and have several poetry collections in our queue.  One of the bennies of a modest familiarity of general poetry is that when an allusion or outright reference to a poem is dropped in literature, we usually catch it.   Additionally, I think the daily drip, drip of words crafted together will infuse into us a sense of their beauty. 

Please! Some days the poems are dogs.  My son and I both roll our eyes and mumble what-ev-er.  Some days I’m delighted and my son is tolerant. On occasion, however, the words hit their mark and arrest us both.