Reading Poetry in the Age of Anxiety - the Only Way to Live: Garry Leonard
Katherine Leyton seeks to teach strangers the value of verse
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in the hopes of inspiring strangers to have new and vital relationships with the poetically written give-and-take.
"Poetry has such a bad rap," Leyton says. "People will tell me well-nigh how they had to analyze Robert Frost poems in high school, and how boring information technology was, only poetry doesn't have to be like that." She'due south hoping her blog will change the public's perceptions about poetry and make it more accessible to those who might otherwise shy away from it.
Most of the participants read the poem Leyton provides simply moments before they recite it, and while in some videos this is obvious, in others, the readers recite with such feeling and confidence that it's hard non to think it's apposite. "Practiced poetry should always work beginning on a gut level — it should communicate with you intuitively," Leyton explains. "I think that for nearly poets, that's the aim."
A poet with a masters in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh, Leyton has spent the majority of the last decade overseas in Italian republic and Scotland, or in Montreal, and the selection of poets on Howpedestrian.ca reflects her ain diverse literary influences. Just a small sampling of poets on the site includes Derek Walcott (Caribbean), Anna Akhmatova (Russian federation), Matsuo Basho (Japan) and Patricia Kolaiti (Greece). Each video post is accompanied by the poem itself, every bit well equally a written entry by Leyton describing the life and literary sensibilities of the poet being read.
Sifting through the web log entries, the diverseness of poets represented is immediately apparent, still in that location is something even more hitting: the diversity of the readers. Toronto is Canada's — and maybe the world's — most multi-ethnic city, and Leyton captures this cultural diaspora brilliantly: Amidst her readers are Trinidad-Tobagans, Chinese, Greeks, South Africans, Italians and Crees. The diversity of professions is as well eye-opening — nosotros see a priest, a cab driver, a bartender, a chef, a newscaster, a painter, a professor, a rapper and a Danforth gyro-maker, all reciting verse.
"I've been very surprised by how open up people are to being approached, to hearing most the project and to engaging with poetry in front of a camera," she says, and adds that near 95% of the people she approaches agree to read, and that those who refuse unremarkably do so because they're nervous well-nigh the photographic camera, not the poetry. "I'm bothering people randomly, and yet near anybody is genuinely excited about participating. The experience has actually reminded me of how live this urban center is," she says. The majority of readers react noticeably to what they are reading, and many request to keep a copy of the poem, to which she always readily agrees.
Sometimes, the calendar week's poems are grouped around a theme, ofttimes tied to an outcome in Toronto. For two weeks in June she captured the World Cup fever that is consuming the metropolis, bringing poems near soccer to the bars and cafés where supporters congregate. Last week featured G20 protesters reading poems nigh resistance.
Similar near poets, Leyton wants more of the earth to share and rejoice in the rich interpretations of the human experience that simply poetry can provide. She'southward hoping that her weblog will convince people to engage with poetry in a vital and maybe more pedestrian fashion. "The Canadian poet Lorna Crozier said that poets are always trying to say the unsayable, to communicate something that every man being has experienced but that yous tin can't really put into words," Leyton says. "Nosotros're attempting the incommunicable, and sometimes, we achieve information technology."
petersonsuind1974.blogspot.com
Source: https://nationalpost.com/posted-toronto/katherine-leyton-seeks-to-teach-strangers-the-value-of-verse
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