Beyond poetry

If I read one poem every day, it would take me a year and a half to finish the book.

It's called the Oxford Book of American Poets. It's got Dickinson, Lindsay, St. Vincent Millay, Whitman, Frost...five hundred seventy one poems in all. Five hundred seventy one days. It seems almost impossible that I'll be able to read them all, but that's part of the mystique of the thing. One small blue-covered book, with five hundred seventy one separate emotions and scenes. There's so much in there to see! If I can read them all...

I don't really know why I consider this such an accomplishment, a task that I feel I have to finish. But I do. I have to read it all and understand it all too.

Sophia is on a Shakespeare binge. Her class is performing Romeo and Juliet (guess who's Juliet?), and now she just can't get enough-- she's watching Romeo + Juliet (the Leonardo one), and we saw Shakespeare in Love last night. It's kind of a good thing she's going so crazy. If not Shakespeare, what would you have her crave? And the more I sit and listen to the lines with her, the more I understand. I've never heard Shakespeare like this before. It used to be that these were just words, beautiful feelings created by a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter. But now the words are alive in my heart too, and I think I might know why. But is that reason ok? Do I really love you beyond poetry? I'm not sure, which makes me think I'm not. But maybe? Question marks times a hundred.

Things are falling apart brick by brick, and yet Shakespeare and poetry stand still in the middle of it. What in the world are they doing?