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Illustration by Alex Chen
Twice a week, I meet with two elderly men to read poems out loud. The poems are ancient, even older than us. They’re usually love sonnets or war epics or, sometimes, the lyrics of traditional songs. They’re often obscure and they’re always in French.
We’re anglophones, so it’s a pretty painful meeting. We mangle words. Ruin rhymes. Pay no attention to meter. And, more often than we’d like to admit, we have no idea what we’re waxing on about.
This started six years ago, when Keith, John and I decided to form a French conversation group. We had one goal: not to lose the French we had. We were about the same comprehension level: Intermediate Awkward. Which means we can recognize a joke but can’t tell if it’s funny, we can order ratatouille without scaring off the server, and we can watch films from France without expecting a plot.
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In the beginning, we didn’t read poems, we chatted about current events. Then we shifted to magazine articles. One of us would bring in an article, we’d take turns reading paragraphs aloud, then we’d discuss. One day, after slogging through a long-form feature on the evolution of corn, John suggested we try something short. Keith said poems were short.
I once met a poet who said, the thing about poetry is that everybody writes it but nobody reads it.
This was sadly true of me. As a teen, I filled notebooks. Then I got busy and lost the habit. Of writing, I mean. I never actually read them. I ended up working in the theatre so got to know Shakespeare, and could recite In Flanders Fields and sing Leonard Cohen songs. The only French poem I knew was our national anthem.
At first, I wasn’t entirely sold. Were we wasting our time? Was poetry elitist? How long was I going to have to keep looking up every word?
Then I realized something. I’ve learned more from reading poems that I can barely understand than I have from any other activity I’ve tried in the last 20 years. And that includes Improv for Seniors and Extreme Gardening.
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Here’s one thing I like: It doesn’t seem to matter whether I “get” them or not. Poems are like ants, they somehow find their way in. By some strange alchemy, you puzzle over a verse while, unbeknownst to you, an image forms in your mind. You don’t even know it’s happening. Then one day that image presents itself as a thought.
For instance, last week I was picking lint off my clothes (a tissue had infiltrated the dryer) and instead of grumbling to my husband (who didn’t check his pockets) I remembered Émile Nelligan’s poem about a Montreal winter’s evening and thought, “Ah, how the snow has snowed!”
And last night, during my ritual 2 a.m. trip to the loo, I looked out the window and thought, “Molière looked at this very same moon.”
Poetry sneaks up on you. You may think it’s superfluous, that it serves no practical purpose and it’s true that it can’t fix my plumbing. Or pay my grocery bills. But it has changed the way I think.
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It’s also made me some friends. I’m at an age where I’m more likely to make an osteopath rich than to make a close friend. Yet, Keith and John and I have grown close. We’ve come to know each other in ways I’m convinced we wouldn’t have otherwise. Poems are intimate. They get you talking about intimate things.
Instead of grumbling about my dentist, who is now speaking faster than I can listen, I marvel as Keith – in slow, hesitant French – brings my attention to the distinction between loneliness and solitude. I sit forward in amazement as John – using the subjunctive – compares an ode to nature to the tree outside his bedroom window.
That said, I don’t think my French has improved. The other day, a tourist from Québec stopped me for directions and, when I responded in his language, he asked me what part of Hungary I was from.
But that’s not the point. The point is, for one hour, twice a week, I’m keeping a sense of wonder alive. I’m not fixating on the fact that I’ve now got more fur on my ears than my poodle has on hers. I’m trying to figure out the meaning of things. I’m thinking about nature. I’m noticing details.
Reading poetry out loud probably works in English, too. I plan to try it one day. For the moment, I don’t have time. I’m too busy noticing stars and looking up archaic French words.
Rona Waddington lives in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.