To Let It Out and Take It Back Again
Whenever April comes around, and I realize that it'southward National Poetry Month, I get a piddling nervous. I'yard a poet, and National Poetry Month makes me think about how fumbling and inarticulate I feel whenever someone asks me what I write poems near, or why I write poems, or what's so dandy about poems. It'south not that the questions are unfair, of grade; it's just that I don't know the answers. I fell in love with verse at some point in my life, long before I knew what it was or how to arrive. I know that poetry matters, but it'southward hard for me to explain how or why.
This year, I'm thinking about that difficulty as National Poetry Month rolls around, and the springtime with it, and we emerge — or, perhaps, we don't sally — from years of a petty more than social isolation than we're used to. Nosotros're changing, and aye, nosotros're e'er changing, but at the moment, as a culture, it seems to me that we're pretty uncomfortable about it. I believe poesy might offer us some tools for embracing change, so I'm going to give that a attempt hither by explaining why the medium matters and so much.
Poesy Is Mutual and Everywhere
First, let's deal with the problem of our general perception of poetry. We tend to think of poesy as special or unusual, removed from the mundane happenings of everyday life. People read poems at special occasions like weddings and funerals, or they learn about the poems and poets assigned to them in English classes, or they come beyond bits of poetry memed in false-inspirational Facebook posts.
I'm not saying that stuff isn't poetry, but I'yard maxim it's definitely not all of information technology. The primeval forms of poetry weren't written downwards but spoken aloud: not on the page, but in the torso. Verse was — and is — closely related to music, which nosotros readily have is capable of making us experience without necessarily making sense. It's idea that the earliest poems were cultural attempts to recall what needed to be remembered.
Put all this together, and you begin to understand poetry equally an entirely necessary piece of communication. It's an everyday thing. Like every twenty-four hours of your life, verse's total of experimentation and feeling. It's trying to say what needs to be said but in a style that's new, full of life, and able to be remembered when we need it about.
Learning What You Already Know
I've had the experience now and over again of going back to wait at something I wrote years ago and realizing that information technology contains information I've been needing. When my grandmother passed away, I happened to find an old poem I wrote that had some lines nearly acceptance and retention. I'd been feeling overwhelmed and sad about her death, but of a sudden my own poem, coming to me from out of the by, seemed helpful. I felt virtually similar I fourth dimension-traveled back to the past to brand sure I jotted down the thoughts I'd need in the future. About.
Poetry is useful in other ways, though. The way we experience the world is completely entangled in the language we employ to describe information technology. That language is largely metaphorical, and poetry is great at coming up with metaphors. When yous accept lost someone, your heart breaks. When you finally understand something, you see the light. When you're feeling wonderful, you might even exist glowing. These statements are non literally truthful, but they feel even truer than true. The comparison amplifies the truth.
It'due south fortunate for u.s. that linguistic communication works this style, because it ways it's capable of irresolute equally it adapts to the way nosotros feel the earth — as our frames of reference change, and as our available comparisons modify. Language adapts whether we resist that adaptation or not, but more and more, information technology seems to me that nosotros're afraid of changing. The pandemic, our politics, and a million other things have usa using a lot of language nearly "getting back to normal," but our ability to modify is essential. As the poet Eleni Sikelianos puts it: "Poems maximize the adaptability of language, and, as we know, accommodation is key to animal survival."
Let Verse Change Your Mind This National Poetry Calendar month
The rules of language are always a piffling bit behind the people who use information technology. Grammatical rules are an attempt to capture a moment in time — to say, "Here'due south how we're doing it at present." We're alive, though. In one case we've described "now," it'due south already in the past, 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 free to play effectually in our language, to dispense it and alter it and run across if nosotros tin make it piece of work for us. On the other mitt, we can never fully understand it — information technology's an organic affair, living and changing in response to the world of which it is a part. Conversations effectually what pronouns people employ make it clear that this stuff produces a lot of cultural feet. I wish information technology wouldn't, and I think poetry tin can help.
I'll end with an case from a poem chosen "Facing Information technology," past the nifty 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 verse form, the veteran sees his face up in the granite and thinks: "I'g rock." Then the rest of the poem happens. Past the end of information technology, he thinks: "I'm a window." It's non that the pain, or the horrors of war, or the cruelties of life have disappeared, information technology's but that the verse form embodies a change in the begetting of the person. I think most that a lot — about the importance of knowing both that I can change my mind and that my listen can modify. This April, once again, information technology feels good 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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