Poetry and Me

Johns Hopkins Inlet, Alaska

I fell in love with my first poem in elementary school.  I probably read other poems, but the first one that really touched me was one I found in a book.  The book was The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson.  In the book 11-year-old Gilly is a troubled foster child.  She ends up with a woman who won’t give up on her.

At one point, Gilly is asked to read a poem to her elderly, blind neighbor.  The poem is an excerpt from Ode, by William Wordsworth.  The poem is over 200 lines long, but less than 20 were included in the book.  Of course, I didn’t know that because these were pre-internet days.  What I did know was that the poem felt like it spoke to me, reached down inside and touched a special chord.  I read that poem over and over.  It was the first poem I transcribed in a spiral notebook of poems and snippets of text I liked.  I can still recite the excerpt today.

We were taught to analyze poetry in my high school, so I may have developed a love of poetry anyway, but I have to imagine that there was something special about being introduced to it so young, and on my own.  No one told me to like it.  No one directed me to analyze it for a grade.  It was all about me and my relationship with the prose.

I’ve been thinking about this recently, as I write my novel.  In it, I have one of the main characters quote lines of poetry and prose.  She does this maybe a half dozen times.  My critique partner hates it.  His argument is that you shouldn’t need to use someone else’s words to invoke an emotion.

I’m torn.  His argument makes sense, and yet… I remember what it was like to discover Wordsworth as a child, to find that pure love of something that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise discovered.  It still would have been a good book without those lines, but with them, for me, it became something akin to magic.

How do you feel about poems, quotes, or song lyrics in books?

Boy’s Life- A Review

Boy’s Life, by Robert McCammon, is not a book I would have picked up on my own.  It was another book club pick.

I’m going to start off by saying that it took me almost a month to get through.  It was a pretty long book, but also I read two other books while I was reading that one.  For whatever reason, this wasn’t an easy book for me to get through, but I never wanted to stop reading; it just took me longer than most books do.  It really was a beautifully written book and pretty much sums up what childhood feels like: magical, scary, and difficult to understand sometimes.

Boy’s Life takes us through a year in the life of Cory, an 11 year old boy in 1950’s Zephyr, Alabama.  Cory’s father is a milkman, and one morning, while helping him on the route, they see a car plunge into the lake.  His dad jumps in to try to save the man, and finds a man handcuffed to the steering wheel who had been choked by a length of piano wire.

This isn’t a normal book about childhood, murder, or coming of age.  All this is against a backdrop of the normal concerns of an 11 year old in a small town.  There’s a lot of paranormal thrown in, like the monster who lives in the river, a magic bike, and flying through the forest on the first day of summer.  It made me remember how anything can be magical.  And when you’re a kid, even though you know you’re making it up, you still believe it.  An older Cory narrates the story and talks about how the magic of childhood, once lost, can never be quite recaptured.

All in all, I recommend this book.  It was a good book, and worth reading, though I’d recommend getting the book from the library.  Like I said, it took me a month to get through.  I (and other members of my book club) thought the book was a little too long.  I’ll be interested to see what else Robert McCammon has written.