(Originally published in The Christian Science Monitor on 4/20/2006.)

April is National Poetry Month, and perhaps this is a good time to ask ourselves, why have a Poetry Month? Is it really necessary to devote an entire month to poetry? And what does poetry mean to the average person anyway?

Most people I know, even avid readers of other literary genres, confess to not understanding much of the poetry being written today. It’s too obtuse, the language too rarefied, the metaphors too far out.

Yet most people who like to read also want to like poetry. And understand it. Because when you read a poem that resonates, your whole world can shift. Good poetry illuminates and thrills. A great poem distills the very essence of life and offers it up to us in a language that speaks directly to the heart. Not many of us could express romantic love better than Lord Byron, who penned the words,
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of Cloudless climes and starry skies

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(I just found this essay in my files from May 25, 1989. You can also read a companion essay about Ray Bradbury from 1991 that I published on this website on 3/1/17. Both appeared in The Beach Reporter, where I was a columnist and reporter in the 1980s and 1990s.)

Renaissance man (n): “A person who has wide interests and is expert in several areas.” Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury puts the term “Renaissance man” to shame. Dictionary writers should invent a new phrase just to describe him because he not only has wide interests (everything in the world), but he also seems to be an expert at everything. The man is a human sponge. He remembers being born, he remembers everything about his childhood, he has seen about every movie ever made and has read more poems, essays, plays, novels, and nonfiction books than the whole city of Manhattan Beach put together. And, of course, there is all that he has written.

In short, Bradbury amazes you because he has done so much with his life and is so brilliant. At the same time, he inspires you because he makes you feel as though all of this is within your reach, too, if only you can make the effort.

Bradbury spoke recently to a meeting of the Southwest Manuscripters, a South Bay writing group that has been in existence for more than forty years. The Manuscripters were one of the first groups that ever asked Bradbury to be a guest speaker, and he has returned the honor by speaking to the group nearly every year since that time.

He makes the trip from his home in Los Angeles to come to the Torrance High School Little Theater, and speaks to a capacity crowd about what it’s like to be Bradbury. He doesn’t drive a car, although in his books he has put people on Mars. You get the feeling that many in the audience have been here before, that this is an annual pilgrimage. This was my fifth year, and I recognized a lot of familiar faces. Continue reading →