The transportational power of poetry

I read this quote in a book called Bridges Out of Poverty:

Carl Upchurch was in solitary at Lewisburg, Ohio when he found a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets wedged under the short leg of a table. “I won’t pretend that Shakespeare and I immediately connected,” writes Upchurch. “I must have read those damn sonnets twenty times before they started to make sense . Even then, comprehension came slowly – first a word, then a phrase, and finally a whole poem. Those sonnets began to take hold of me, transported me out of the gray world into a world I had never, ever imagined.

It seems almost strange that a black guy in prison, in contemporary times, would be changed by the sonnets of Shakespeare. Of course, he had to be in solitary confinement with nothing else to do to be in that place where you are willing to read stuff that it takes work to read. He was so bored that he had no choice but to read what he had to read, and then reread it, and reread it again.

It is the secret of how to read poetry, I think. Read it. Re-read it. Read it some more.

In this way poetry has the potential of changing our life, and transporting us out of the gray of our current life into a brighter, better life.

Of course, since it was Shakespeare that this guy read, we can assume that it is not just any poetry that can do this. It has to be great poetry.

But that is just an assumption.