To Poetry

We lost, but have moved on

My most recent experience with poetry is the one that I have been having over the past week or so. In this class as well as another, poetry has been a main focus of this first week or so. During that time I have been reading and digesting a lot of poems. Of those, one in particular stood out to me. It is titled "To Piano Lessons" and is written by Kenneth Koch.

The poem spoke to me in a way that few poems manage to do. In “To Piano Lessons,” I hear the tones of regret. That familiar and perhaps most painful of emotions, when one sees their own potential while seeing where they ended up. My father once told me that he believed that the burning of Hell or Outer Darkness or whatever torture one would face for wickedness was simply regret, because nothing so scorches a soul like regret. It is written like a love letter to a love never taken. The poem is beautiful and sad, like all good things that we allow to slip past us.

Poetry usually has a hard time getting through to me, likely since I would not describe myself as particularly in touch with my emotions. I instead find myself reading them only when academic needs force me to. 

Something tells me that this won't change about me, and I am at peace with this idea. I think that it isn't necessary to force myself to enjoy a kind of media that I don't normally enjoy, and yet at the same time I can't help but wonder if my brief and often striking affairs with poetry may some day come back to haunt me in the same way that the Piano Lessons spoken of by Koch.

For all these reasons and more, I will be memorizing "To Piano Lessons" itself, since it is my favorite poem in a long time.