Last night at dinner Timothy was most unhappy because after a successful sememster of hybrid learning, he was now back in school full time. Then, if things couldn't get any worse (and never mind that the U.S. Capitol was stormed because high school has its own drama) his literature class was beginning a HUGE unit on poetry.
Timothy. And poetry.
I was positively delighted.
I told him to think of poetry like art; that when an artist paints on canvas, the final result is not one dimensional but rather contains multi-layers of symbolism, color, mood, composition, and brushstroke; then, one must consider the medium, the genre, not to mention tone and perspective.
"Poetry is like art, except with words, punctuation, and spacing, " I explain. "And like a work of art, a poem is meant to be interpreted."
"Why can't people just say what they mean?" he grumbled.
A few minutes later he grabbed a sticky note, scribble 4 = 4, and then asked us if the numbers were the same.
Joe immediately said that they were the same, but with the equal sign it would make better sense if the equation had said something like 4 = 3 + 1, or 2 + 2 = 4.
Since we had just been discussing poetry, though, I disagreed and pointed out that if you were to approach it poetically, then those numbers were not the same at all.
"That's EXACTLY what my literature teacher said!" he shouted, kind of proud that I got it.
Then he started laughing and said this was a perfect example of how Joe and I are completely opposite. Joe immediately saw a math equation, whereas I saw a poem.
It WAS pretty funny.
Timothy continued to grumble about school and dumb poets until I passed him a heaping bowl of spetzzatino (Italian beef stew) served on a mound of polenta. And ... just like that all was right with the world.
Spetzzatino and polenta ... now THAT is poetry.
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