Pomes
Unlike Tom, I've never really been a poetry person. I do, however, have a friend who has made it their mission over the last few years to get me into poetry, periodically sending me stuff—often Mary Oliver—which I will read, admit is Actually Good, then say "maybe you're right, maybe poetry is ok", then not really follow up on and go back to where I was before. Occasionally I'd be fired with enthusiasm and try a book of poetry, but I bounced off them pretty quickly. I still felt like I was picking up pebbles at the foot of an mountain, unable to find a handhold to start climbing.
Sometime last year, though, I came to a similar realisation to the one Tom did and started trying to read poems aloud, or at least under my breath. It really does change the way you experience them; I realised this is a revelation I've had before, too— the most I ever connected with poetry in an academic context was when Luke Wright did a reading our school. Part of it was the sight of the English teachers squirming slightly whenever he said a swearword, but part of it was the way he delivered them, and, as William's Aunt Lucy would say, the written word doesn't touch the heart as the spoken word does. I found myself starting to connect a lot more with poems after I tried to work out how they should be read.
Then, after a series of events I can't altogether remember, I ended up subscribed to a few email newsletters that send poems daily. I'm a big fan of email newsletters in general, and found myself pretty receptive to poems in my inbox once a day. Partly this is because I'm someone who listens to individual songs more than albums, but mostly I imagine it's because it's something that fits into an existing workflow, and I'm all about existing workflows. Most of the newsletters I subscribe to get sent round at lunchtime and it's nice to stop working for a bit, eat some food and read some poems. One of the newsletters I subscribe to is called Pome, which specialises in small poems from modern poets. This was my favourite one recently:
