Quote and Comment, Bradbury

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. 

Ray Bradbury

Over ten years ago I read my first book by Billy Collins, Ballistics. Since then, I’ve consistently had a book of poetry in my reading stack. While I don’t think Bradbury was necessarily aiming his comment at writers, reading poetry has impacted me creatively in a variety of ways. More specifically, I believe it’s had a positive impact on my prose––especially my novel in progress.

As Bradbury states, it builds muscles that might ordinarily get little or no attention. 

So exactly what does poetry bring?

Reading poetry brings new perspective to sentence length, word choice, and euphony––the music or rhythm in poetry. It brings awareness of how the prose looks on the page and how it reads aloud. It reinforces the importance of ending a paragraph with the penultimate phrase, or starting a paragraph with an image that demands the reader’s attention. Good narrative poetry provides insight into how to tell a story, when to be a minimalist, when to be an impressionist, and how concrete details––the right concrete details––can bring an unmatched realism.

Perhaps you don’t have any poetry on your shelf and don’t know where to start. Consider picking up a copy of Mark Lilley’s debut, Lucky Boy. Or start where I did, with Ballistics. Perhaps read through the Psalms in the Bible––a collection of ancient Hebrew poetry. Follow Bradbury’s advice. You’ll be glad you did.