I saw Keira Knightly interviewed on Jon Stewart. It seems she has worked as an actress most of
her life. He kept trying to act like she
had missed something with all of her work, like wouldn’t she rather be
partying. She looked at him with a
withering glance, like don’t you get it.
Clearly, she enjoys her work. I
wondered at the time, and again, now, why in this country “work” is considered
a bad word. Again, I go back to
school.
One of the oncology nurses
likes to check out what each person brings to read during chemo. When he saw I had a book of poems, he said he
wished he could read poems but he can’t.
He then proceeded to tell me of a complex tradition of Icelandic
poems,
and, then, he spoke of Shakespeare and how any love he might have had
there was destroyed by having to match passages with speakers in school. He said
poems in school were analyzed with no attempt to convey that they were about real
people, meaning, feelings. He had all
this to say, and then, again lamented that he didn’t know poetry, that it had
been taken from him, and he was too old to return.
I might have said I was listening to a poem, the oral tradition revived, the meaning, the heart, the feelings inside.
