If I Could Do It All Again I Would Have Never Let You Go
Whenever April comes around, and I realize that it's National Verse Month, I get a little nervous. I'chiliad a poet, and National Poetry Month makes me think nigh how fumbling and inarticulate I feel whenever someone asks me what I write poems about, or why I write poems, or what'south so neat well-nigh poems. Information technology'south not that the questions are unfair, of course; it's merely that I don't know the answers. I fell in love with poetry at some point in my life, long before I knew what information technology was or how to make it. I know that verse matters, merely it's difficult for me to explicate how or why.
This twelvemonth, I'm thinking most that difficulty as National Poetry Calendar month rolls around, and the springtime with it, and we emerge — or, possibly, nosotros don't emerge — from years of a trivial more social isolation than we're used to. We're changing, and yes, we're always changing, simply at the moment, as a civilisation, it seems to me that we're pretty uncomfortable virtually it. I believe poesy might offer us some tools for embracing change, so I'thousand going to give that a try here by explaining why the medium matters and then much.
Poetry Is Common and Everywhere
Showtime, permit's deal with the problem of our general perception of poetry. We tend to think of verse as special or unusual, removed from the mundane happenings of everyday life. People read poems at special occasions like weddings and funerals, or they acquire nigh the poems and poets assigned to them in English classes, or they come across bits of poetry memed in faux-inspirational Facebook posts.
I'm not saying that stuff isn't poetry, but I'm saying it's definitely not all of it. The earliest forms of poetry weren't written downwardly only spoken aloud: not on the folio, but in the trunk. Poetry was — and is — closely related to music, which nosotros readily accept is capable of making us feel without necessarily making sense. Information technology's thought that the earliest poems were cultural attempts to recollect what needed to exist remembered.
Put all this together, and you begin to empathise poetry as an entirely necessary slice of communication. It'southward an everyday thing. Similar every mean solar day of your life, poesy's full of experimentation and feeling. It'due south trying to say what needs to be said but in a way that'south new, full of life, and able to be remembered when we need it most.
Learning What You Already Know
I've had the experience now and again of going back to look at something I wrote years ago and realizing that it contains information I've been needing. When my grandmother passed away, I happened to observe an one-time verse form I wrote that had some lines nearly credence and retentivity. I'd been feeling overwhelmed and lamentable almost her death, but of a sudden my ain poem, coming to me from out of the past, seemed helpful. I felt almost like I fourth dimension-traveled dorsum to the past to brand certain I jotted downwardly the thoughts I'd need in the futurity. Almost.
Poetry is useful in other ways, though. The way we experience the world is completely entangled in the language we use to depict it. That linguistic communication is largely metaphorical, and poetry is bang-up at coming up with metaphors. When y'all have lost someone, your center breaks. When you lot finally understand something, yous run across the light. When you're feeling wonderful, you lot might even be glowing. These statements are not literally truthful, but they feel even truer than true. The comparison amplifies the truth.
It's fortunate for us that language works this style, because it means it'due south capable of changing as it adapts to the way we experience the globe — as our frames of reference modify, and as our available comparisons alter. Language adapts whether we resist that accommodation or non, but more than and more, it seems to me that nosotros're afraid of changing. The pandemic, our politics, and a million other things have us using a lot of language about "getting back to normal," but our power to modify is essential. As the poet Eleni Sikelianos puts it: "Poems maximize the adaptability of linguistic communication, and, as we know, adaptation is cardinal to animate being survival."
Allow Poetry Change Your Mind This National Poetry Calendar month
The rules of language are ever a little bit behind the people who use information technology. Grammatical rules are an endeavor to capture a moment in time — to say, "Hither'south how we're doing it at present." We're live, though. In one case we've described "now," it'southward already in the by, and we've moved on. Never mind the fact that there are thousands of languages operating with thousands of sets of rules.
This should be both liberating and humbling. We should be gratuitous to play effectually in our language, to manipulate information technology and alter it and come across if nosotros can make information technology work for us. On the other hand, nosotros can never fully understand it — it's an organic affair, living and changing in response to the globe of which information technology is a part. Conversations effectually what pronouns people utilize make it clear that this stuff produces a lot of cultural anxiety. I wish it wouldn't, and I think poetry can help.
I'll end with an example from a verse form called "Facing It," by the great American poet Yusef Komunyakaa. In the poem, a veteran of the war in Vietnam is looking at his reflection in the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
At the beginning of the poem, the veteran sees his face in the granite and thinks: "I'm stone." Then the rest of the poem happens. By the finish of it, he thinks: "I'm a window." It'southward not that the pain, or the horrors of war, or the cruelties of life accept disappeared, information technology'southward just that the poem embodies a change in the bearing of the person. I think near that a lot — about the importance of knowing both that I can alter my heed and that my listen can alter. This Apr, once again, it feels expert to be reminded.
Source: https://www.ask.com/culture/national-poetry-month-let-poetry-change-your-mind?utm_content=params%3Ao%3D740004%26ad%3DdirN%26qo%3DserpIndex
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