In the house I grew up in, there was a room next to the living room that we called the music room. My father hung French doors to separate it, and built book shelves to line two walls.
My mother bought an old upright piano and had it tuned. She played the piano pretty well. I remember a metronome that my father bought at the Salvation Army Thrift Shop. There was a music stand and chair for practicing the clarinet or trumpet.
My father played a saxophone and sometimes a harmonica. He also had a ukulele that he must have brought back from Hawaii after the war. He only knew one song for the ukulele and every time he started to sing it my mother told him to hush up. I suspect the words weren’t suitable for young ears.
My older brother and I took piano lessons for years. He turned into a wonderful musician. I struggled through the basics, but have no natural sense of musical pitch or rhythm.
We had a record player in the music room, and my father would check out records from the public library to play for us. He loved jazz, but also loved J.S. Bach. I remember hearing the Goldberg Variations for the first time on that record player.
My mother would sit on the piano stool and read to us kids, while we all sat on the floor in front of her. She read stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne. I remember a story about a man getting bricked into a wall in the basement. (I’m still nervous in tight space - and basements.)
One day when I was about 11 or 12 years old, my brother was probably 13, and my two younger sisters were around 8 and 4, my mother called us kids into the music room to read a poem to us. She was taking a night class in poetry and studying T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, so she read us the whole poem – just read it – no explanations or discussions.
It was kind of a strange choice for children our age, but I loved it. My mother had a beautiful reading voice. (Later in life she read books on tape for the blind.) So I’m sure she did a beautiful reading of Prufrock, and maybe that’s why it impressed me so much. Or maybe it’s just a wonderful poem. I’ve read it to myself numerous times since and always taken something new out of it.
Prufrock wasn’t the first poem I’d read. I had a Mother Goose book, and A Child’s Garden of Verses. I had a book of English poems my mother had given me. I had even memorized Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which starts out:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
And goes on for 32 some verses.
But Prufrock was different, and I think that afternoon in the music room was the real start of my love affair with poetry.
Poetry should be read out loud, for the pure enjoyment of the words, without worrying too much about what it means.
Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins
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 a rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
You thought I was going to give you Prufrock. No, not today. Discover it yourself.
