Shrine, Richard St. John's most recent publication

by Richard St. John

What if you feel you can’t connect with poetry?  What if it seems less like “felt experience” than a complex “story problem” you were assigned in class, but never were able to solve?   Well, lots of people feel that way.  I think it’s because they were taught that you had to “understand” poetry in order to experience it, when really it’s the other way around. Poet Richard St. John discusses entering the world of poetry in the second of his two-part series “The Power of Personal Experience.”

Click here to read St. John’s  latest contemplation on poetry, “The Power of Personal Experience — Part II”

Click here for the full table of contents to our current issue The Case for Poetry in Our Age

Poetry. We seem to view poetry nowadays as if it dwells singularly in the province of pretentious intellectuals, academic institutions, and (if we are lucky) the occasional 11^th-grade English classroom. I find this development sad. For some reason we think that poetry is somehow inaccessible, a rarefied highbrow art form expressed in overwrought language. Yet if you think about the birth of the arts from back in the days when we were sleeping under the stars and keeping warm by open fires, we were also doing a couple of other things, practicing our most primal elements of culture: dance, song, some basic rhythms for music, and yes, speaking or chanting poetry to one another. Now we have arrived in the 21^st century, and we seem to have neglected our origins under the open sky. Bring back the poets, I say.

Click here to read our most recent article, “Bring Back the Poets,” released today.

Percy Bysshe Shelley by Alfred Clint, after Amelia Curran, and Edward Ellerker Williams (National Portrait Gallery, London)

Frank X. Gaspar, Night of a Thousand Blossoms

TMD is releasing a new issue this week: The Case for Poetry in Our Age. Our first article comes from poet Richard St. John as he considers how personal and true the poem is as a form of human expression. “There are lots ways to talk about poetry.  Here’s one that resonates, especially, for me: Poetry is a way of telling truth. A particular kind of truth: not the stripped-down “truth” of a mathematical equation or controlled scientific experiment, but the felt, lived truth of human experience.“

Read more in this most recent contribution to The Muse Dialogue: “The Power of Personal Experience” by Richard St. John.