I read a lot, but the genre that makes my heart beat faster is poetry,
doubtless because I’m a very feeling person.
A lot of what I read these days purports to being poetry when it isn’t.
I know I’m reading poetry when it becomes more than it is, words taking on nuance beyond themselves.
Often I find poetry in music. Take, for example, Bono’s “Grace,” transcending a girl’s name, to becoming extended metaphor of redemptive goodness:
Grace
It’s the name for a girl
It’s also a thought that
Changed the world
And when she walks on the street
You can hear the strings
Grace finds goodness
In everything
Another example would be the Beatles’ haunting “Eleanor Rigby,” exemplum of loneliness, or disconnectedness, hidden amid the crowd, but profoundly present:
Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?
This, my friends, is poetry!
Brimmings: up from the well 