OLD LEFT BRAIN, RIGHT BRAIN

Three years ago, at a Wednesday evening service at our church usually conducted by laypeople, I did a reflection and reading of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne and George Herbert, both 17th century Anglican clerics and poets. The group liked it and asked me this year to do a Sunday forum from 9:15 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. prior to the Sunday service. Some people seem shocked that an old underwear schlepper and sporting goods marketing man could like poetry. Well, folks, it's that old left brain, right brain stuff---we're all a mix. Plus, I was an English Literature major...This is how I started my talk.

I am often asked how I got so interested in poetry. I came from a family who deeply appreciated the written word, so, from the time I was a child, I was constantly exposed to literature in many forms, and I recall many dinners where my father and step-mother would talk about books or poems or current events at the dinner table with my brothers and me. In other words, my brothers and I absorbed a lot from a sort of literary osmosis: it was always there, seeping into our consciousness.

Then an important happening in my sixth grade year of school really clinched my love of poetry. I had a wonderful and beautiful teacher in the sixth grade named Jean Bruner, who was tall, willowy, with flowing brown hair and lovely blue eyes---an older woman of perhaps twenty-four---on whom I had a twelve-year-old crush. Miss Bruner assigned us in English class to memorize and recite a poem to the class.

I went home and informed Patricia, my step-mother, who was a second mother to me, not the wicked witch so often associated with the term “step-mother”. She and I talked about some possible poems, and I picked from an anthology John McCrea’s “In Flanders Fields”, a famous poem of World War I written by a Canadian doctor in that war, who died in 1918 in France from pneumonia complicated by meningitis. I duly studied and memorized the poem and then started an audition for Patricia in my best sing-song style, so often used by kids in classes.

"In Flander's Fields the poppies grow...
between the crosses row on row..."
TA-DA-TA-DA-TA-DA-TA-DA

Patricia raised a hand and said, “Stop. That’s not how you say a poem, you’ve got to get the meaning across. You have to read it with feeling and understanding. Don’t worry: the sense of the rhyme will come through if you recite it properly.” Patricia and I practiced and practiced until she felt I had it right.

Then my big day at school arrived, and I waited my turn in class nervously. As it turned out, I was the last to recite. I recited it with all the feeling I could muster, and, if I say so myself, I nailed it.

Miss Bruner then made my day, as she in her husky contralto voice said, “Alexander, that was beautiful. “ Turning to the class, she said, “That is how a poem should be read.” Wow, what a sixth grade moment!

And here I am, almost seventy years later, still hooked on poetry. Thank you, Miss Bruner and Patricia!