Let us now praise poetry

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Leo recited the first poem. He was sipping whiskey, I was nursing a beer, and spirits seem a potion more conducive to declaiming verse. He was 75 years old that autumn evening; I was 34. I'd known him all my life as the father of my oldest friend and something of a surrogate dad to me.

The rest of the crew — a gathering of family and friends — had settled on a theater excursion, but Leo demurred and I opted to keep him company. I forget what thread of our conversation launched that poem, but I immediately responded with another and we were off, tag-teaming with verse — unselfconscious, delighted and chuckling at our audacity. "Poetry," wrote Carl Sandburg, "is an echo asking a shadow to dance." We did that. The affection and joy suffusing the room was palpable, like the radiant glow of a hearth.

Leo had memorized his poems in school during the 1920s, when such a discipline was valued and routine. I'd mastered mine during solitary night shifts at a sewage treatment plant. It was a means to stay sharp, to kill a long shift. I worked aloud, so the stanzas of William Butler Yeats resounded from the dripping dome and dark ripples of the primary clarifiers.

Many, if not most people have a predilection for poetry stretching back to nursery rhymes and Dr. Seuss, but during a freshman year at what was then the College of St. Thomas I was especially fortunate to take an introductory poetry course delivered by a man who was clearly inspired by the language and vibe of verse. He was a middle-aged Catholic priest, and I was wary at first, having known some fierce, humorless clerics. But besides his love for the genre, he won me over the morning he had the temerity to assure the skeptical Vietnam combat veteran in the front row that the poetry of Englishman Wilfred Owen, a recipient of the Military Cross who was killed in World War I, would provide the veteran insights into warfare. By the man's own admission, it did.

As Rita Dove wrote, "Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful."

Speaking of power, the nearly invincible Mongol armies of the 13th century that swept all before them from Hungary to the Korean Peninsula, were victorious in no small part because of poetry. Their superb military organization was sustained and lubricated by orders constructed in verse. In a biography of Genghis Khan, Jack Weatherford wrote: "Mongols often used specific poetic forms of alliteration and meter, similar to a limerick in English but much more serious in tone, to convey messages as exactly as possible in a way that could be easily memorized not only by the messenger but also by everyone who heard it."

And hearing it is paramount. Quietly reading poetry to yourself is not harmful, but it's like taking a sauna while clothed. Enable the audio stream. Even if alone, boldly speak the lines like the spells and incantations they are. How intensely you feel the buzz and recoil of a particular work is linked to how finely tuned are the acoustics in your head. Listen. A common bit of advice given to prose writers is to read their sentences aloud, the rationale being that if it sounds good it might indeed be worthy. That goes doubly for poetry; resonance is the point. "I went out to the hazel wood," wrote Yeats, "because a fire was in my head."

In the 1969 Chisholm High School yearbook each senior was asked to list their "ambition." I recall a surprising number of would-be teachers. Not everyone listed a goal, and saying nothing was my first impulse. I just wanted to move on — emotionally, and aboard a Greyhound bus. But I decided to leave a little something behind. Ambition? I wrote: Poet. I even mostly meant it, especially when it appeared on the glossy page of the yearbook. Why not be a poet? Didn't mean you couldn't also have a real job.

Plus, anything might be possible. Ten years earlier a high school graduate from neighboring Hibbing had drifted off to the Twin Cities, then to New York and hit the big time. "I consider myself a poet first and a musician second," said Bob Dylan (nee Zimmerman). True that — he was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and appropriately so. "I live like a poet," he continued, "and I'll die like a poet."

So far as I can tell — despite our common Iron Range roots — I haven't lived like Bob Dylan. I worked blue collar jobs for over fifty years — logging, construction, farm labor, firefighting — and have the voluminous medical records to prove it. I scribbled poetry about that life — thousands of lines. Some of it was even published. Is that living like a poet? Partly.

What's impressed me over the decades is how much poetry is present in the work-a-day world. My Oregon logging job was anchored around an imposing crane-like machine called a high-side yarder that consumed a prodigious quantity of diesel fuel and regularly snapped three-quarter-inch steel cables. Its owner — our boss — was a relentless, no-nonsense, hard-driving autocrat known as "The Hook," and yet, just below the operator's cab of the yarder was a beautifully painted floral motif inscribed with the machine's name: Little Hyleezah Esoteric.

On a construction crew in Texas we often dug ditches by hand, wielding picks and #2 shovels. One of my sweat-stained colleagues composed and recited a hilarious limerick about our unglamorous labor.

On a wildfire assignment in Idaho, I met a smokejumper out on the line who was reading Virgil — in Latin.

But the external manifestations of poetic sensibility are like the heat of a fever felt by a palm pressed to the forehead — significant, but only a symptom of what stirs within. To live like a poet is to be a little bit feverish, a little bit intense. Not in a nervous or intimidating way, but at a high pitch of mindfulness. Carl Sandburg again: "Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable." In other words, living like a poet is what most thoughtful, alert humans spend a lot of time doing: seeking and establishing meaning. Writing about it is optional, but as someone who's been on the planet for seven decades, I highly recommend the memorization of a few poems.

First, it's a satisfying challenge that rigorously exercises the brain. Second, you're able to touch the poet's mind, or at least the arrangement of words generated by that mind; committing verse to memory is an intimate, respectful act. Third, you gain a valuable possession which cannot be taken away, and whose recitation provides solace and pleasure whenever needed. And perhaps most importantly you may also perform and play, as my old friend Leo and I did on that cherished autumn evening of echoes and shadows I shall not forget.

Peter M. Leschak, of Side Lake, Minn., is the author of "Ghosts of the Fireground" and other books.