So one thing I can say about the year 2006 is that it's the year I discovered poetry. Of course, I'd always known about poetry. I'm not an idiot or a recluse. I studied it in school, broke it down in English classes, I've even had to preform it in an Oral Interp class . I've always appreciated the creative use of language, but whenever I tried to read poetry from the heart it was always like I was a deaf man appreciating the complexity of a symphony by looking at the score. I was seeing and appreciating the all of the notes, but it wasn't making me swoon like everyone around me. For some reason, this year, the ears of my heart opened and I can honestly say I can finally get carried off by the poets pen.

Or maybe that's the key to what's happened. It isn't the pen at all. I have started listening to poetry through podcasts. Perhaps it was in the listening to the words that they really become vivid in my mind. Podcasting is a wonderful forum for this sort of thing. Not to much Broadcast traction for what's being called in some circles "spoken word performance". But with podcasting, they can just fling out a 5 minute piece when they want to and call it good, and every one agrees and cheers and anxiously waits for the next. It's perfect.

I started out with the quite reverence of a poetry reading done by Garrison Keillor in the The Writers Almanac podcast. Discovered it in the iTunes podcast directory. Love the Prairie Home Companion that Garrison Keillor does, and this is a little off shoot of that in the same spirit. A little Lit history lesson, very interesting, and then a poem. I started to realize that I really liked the poetry part. Started to believe that it may even be the part of this podcast I liked best. So I did a general search on iTunes for poetry podcasts. And there were many! I found one called Indiefeed Performance Poetry and started hearing what I'd only read about---Slam Poetry. Like a heavy metal/punk poetry scene. Crazy, and I'm eating it up. These slam poets have Myspace pages with thousands of friends like a rock start or something. Some of it is kind of rude and in your face, but there is an urgency there that is very compelling.

It reminded me, I guess, of the only time there was relief from my poetry appreciation drought. That was when in the early 90s, quite by accident, I got to see Maya Angelou perform live at the college I was attending. I didn't even realize she was just reading poetry. I just knew that I loved to listen to her. She had such an epic, heavenly, shaman like sensibility that I couldn't take my ears off her. She could have been a State Trooper at my rolled down car window telling me she was going to have to give me a ticket and all I would have been able to respond would have been, "Can you say that again".

That's the thing, I guess. Poetry needs to be performed, not just read. A poem that's simply 'read' can still seem dry as licking chalk off a blackboard. But if you get someone who can swish and roll the words around in their mouths properly, then the heavens open up. And now that I have been brought to that moment of understanding and appreciation, even when reading poetry back in print I can still hear the music.

In my daughter's Speech Team Forensics at her High School, there is a fairly large number of poetry competitors. When I was doing it in my High School days there were none. It was all drama and debate. But now I'm coming up to my daughter and setting her down like I have done with songs or movies we share and saying, "You've just gotta hear the poem I down loaded today".

It's nice to know that even when you think you've experienced a little bit of everything, the things you thought you knew can come back and surprise you in fantasticly unexpected ways.