Andrew Kaberline speaking here first. You may have noticed that we have one podcast in our line-up that isn’t run by an ensemble member who specializes in theatre, but rather, by a poetry critical analysis wizard, Matthew Kaberline.

You might be asking, “why does he get a show and not me?” There are many answers, the least accurate being blind nepotism. My brother, a very good poet by all accords, knows how to make poetry easy to listen to, which is a more and more difficult task and the attention spans of the world shrink.

So far, Matt has dove into six poems on Here’s The Word, but today, I want to let him talk to you a bit further about “why poetry?”

Here’s Matt:

Poetry… So much can be accomplished with a single word.

Some of you just heard that word that begins with a P and shivers traveled down your spine at the speed of light. You had flashbacks to high school and the English teacher who repeatedly asked, “but what does the poem mean?” as if it was a rubik cube and you could somehow twist your way to a solution, to a meaning.

Others heard poetry and got all warm and fuzzy inside. You were read Dr. Seuss from an early age. Shakespearean sonnets are your thing. A boyfriend gave you a book of Neruda’s poems and read them to you, maybe in bed (Andrew the Editor’s Note: I absolutely have been guilty of being that guy). You were Emily Dickinson in another life. You would subject yourself to driving through a tropical storm just to hear Billy Collins read his newest collection of laugh-out-loud reflections or Mary Oliver cradle you with her words as she lulls you into nature.

And then there is you, the intended reader of this blog post and the intended listener of our new program, Here’s The Word. For you, poetry doesn’t incite PTSD, but it also is not likely to immerse you in joy…yet. You see, that’s where we come in. We are determined to make poetry a little more fun for all of us. It’s been tried before, in fact every modern Poet Laureate has been tasked with helping poetry become more accessible to the non-poetry reader. It’s not that these efforts have failed, but we figured that any effort to bring poetry to the masses is a noble pursuit, so we decided to throw our hats in the ring.

For your listening enjoyment, we present Here’s The Word, a fresh take on poetry, featuring poems from near and far, old and new, on all sorts of topics, written by all sorts of poets. While the structure of the program will remain relatively stable, the content will vary greatly, all with the goal of introducing you to poetry that you should read.

Why poetry? For thousands of years we have written, read, spoken, and listened to poetry. Stories were told legends were shared, news was passed along, lives were celebrated, loves were sealed, and histories of whole peoples were disseminated through poetry. Poetry remains an essential means of communicating the human condition in all its intricacies and various stages.

Wallace Stevens once observed that, “the purpose of poetry is to contribute to man’s happiness.” When we sing a drinking song in a pub with friends or ramble our way through a favorite nursery rhyme with our kids, we are using poetry to stoke our own happiness. Salman Rushdie’s view on poetry veers in the opposite direction; he notes that “a poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” Through Rushdie’s lens, poets are responsible for keeping the world vigilantly aware of conflicts and appropriately weighed down by the scales of justice. Both of these writers are correct in their assessments, and because they are both correct we can see the diverse beauty of poetry. It’s an all-encompassing form that allows the silly and the serious to exist together, peacefully, in the same world. This is the world we will explore, with you as our guest and co-pilot, on Here’s The Word.

Join us as we invoke Billy Collins and “waterski / across the surface of poems / waving at the author’s name on the shore.”

INTRODUCTION TO POETRY

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

—Billy Collins. “Introduction to Poetry” from The Apple That Astonished Paris. Copyright � 1988, 1996 by Billy Collins.

Andrew again,
My brother started his poetry blog “We Convince By Our Presence,” as a way to honor National Poetry Month. But that isn’t enough. We want to honor poetry all year.