Letting poetry tingle your spine
The right lines in the right place at the right time. You could have read or heard them a thousand times over, or they may drift right through you as fresh as a spring breeze. Some poetry fixes you in its stare and invades the soul while it does so.
A poem is swallowed much more slowly than prose, as if read by the letter rather than the word. There is a need to wring a favourite verse so it, in turn, contorts the reader’s insides. In one line can it grip the heart, twist the stomach and yank the tonsils. The right poem is a visceral, shuddering experience, a marked joy that sparks goosebumps the size of arrowheads, and tickles the spine with static electricity, especially if read alone and aloud.
It should be left to run without interference. Analysing the poem, dissecting it in a needless autopsy, foists science, with its ration and rules, upon a mercurial firework. It claims truths where there are none. Poetry is unquantifiable, which is why one reader’s W. H. Auden is another’s John Cooper Clarke. You jump upon a poem and it piggybacks you to a place of heightened senses and piercing emotions. When the last line is swallowed there is a blissful gap while you fall back to earth. For thirty seconds, you are altered, not fit for other humans and content to be that way.
A poem is yours, and cannot be experienced by anyone else quite precisely as it is by you.