The Poem That Started It. Omar.
Omar high fiving a newly minted poet-in-training at The Bookworm
Tonight, Omar Musa takes poetry to a next level. Come experience the former Australia National Slam Champion in person at The Bookworm (8pm). Bring your friends, family, coworkers. Bring complete strangers you see on the street. He’s that good.
Have you ever wondered what makes a person love poetry? What makes them decide that instead of pursuing fame on the big screen or fortune on the trading floor, they are going to spend their lives hustling for the love of something as ephemeral (though powerful) as the spoken word?
Here Omar shares the poem that started it all:
Impossible to say which poem made me love poetry, but “Porphyria’s Lover” influenced me a lot when I was younger. I was about 16 when I first read it. In both hip hop and poetry, I have always been drawn to storytelling done in a way that was deceptively simple (“Today Was a Good Day” by Ice Cube is what got me into hip hop), especially that which deals with the darker side of man’s nature. “Porphyria’s Lover” taught me that not all poetry has to be a confessional diary entry – I realised you could inhabit characters and become an entirely different person. It also attracted me because of the startling imagery, the vision of a man gone mad and the absolute shock of the moment the persona murders his lover. It was exhilarating to realise that words could make a reader shudder in that way. Accessible but crafted language is since something I’ve always aspired to.
“Porphyria’s Lover” by Robert Browning
