Let Me in I Need to Go Out Again
Whenever Apr comes around, and I realize that information technology's National Poetry Month, I get a little nervous. I'k a poet, and National Verse Month makes me think nearly how fumbling and inarticulate I feel whenever someone asks me what I write poems about, or why I write poems, or what's so great about poems. It's not that the questions are unfair, of course; it's but that I don't know the answers. I vicious in dearest with poetry at some indicate in my life, long before I knew what it was or how to get in. I know that poetry matters, but it's difficult for me to explain how or why.
This twelvemonth, I'm thinking about that difficulty as National Poetry Calendar month rolls around, and the springtime with it, and we emerge — or, perchance, nosotros don't emerge — from years of a lilliputian more social isolation than we're used to. We're irresolute, and yes, we're always changing, just at the moment, as a civilization, it seems to me that nosotros're pretty uncomfortable well-nigh it. I believe poetry might offer u.s.a. some tools for embracing modify, so I'm going to requite that a try here by explaining why the medium matters then much.
Poetry Is Common and Everywhere
Start, allow'southward bargain with the problem of our general perception of poetry. We tend to call back of poetry as special or unusual, removed from the mundane happenings of everyday life. People read poems at special occasions similar weddings and funerals, or they learn about the poems and poets assigned to them in English classes, or they come beyond $.25 of poetry memed in faux-inspirational Facebook posts.
I'chiliad not proverb that stuff isn't poetry, but I'm proverb information technology's definitely not all of information technology. The earliest forms of poetry weren't written down but spoken aloud: not on the folio, merely in the body. Poetry was — and is — closely related to music, which nosotros readily accept is capable of making us feel without necessarily making sense. It's thought that the earliest poems were cultural attempts to remember what needed to be remembered.
Put all this together, and yous begin to understand poetry every bit an entirely necessary piece of communication. It's an everyday matter. Like every twenty-four hour period of your life, poetry'due south full of experimentation and feeling. It's trying to say what needs to exist said but in a manner that's new, total of life, and able to be remembered when we need it most.
Learning What You Already Know
I've had the experience at present 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 abroad, I happened to find an erstwhile poem I wrote that had some lines about acceptance and memory. I'd been feeling overwhelmed and sad well-nigh her death, but suddenly my own poem, coming to me from out of the by, seemed helpful. I felt most like I time-traveled back to the past to make sure I jotted downwards the thoughts I'd need in the future. Almost.
Poetry is useful in other ways, though. The fashion we feel the world is completely entangled in the language we employ to draw it. That linguistic communication is largely metaphorical, and poetry is great at coming up with metaphors. When you have lost someone, your heart breaks. When you finally understand something, yous see the calorie-free. When you lot're feeling wonderful, y'all might fifty-fifty exist glowing. These statements are not literally truthful, only they feel fifty-fifty truer than true. The comparison amplifies the truth.
It's fortunate for the states that linguistic communication works this way, because it means it's capable of changing as it adapts to the way we experience the world — every bit our frames of reference modify, and as our available comparisons change. Language adapts whether nosotros resist that accommodation or non, but more 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 linguistic communication virtually "getting dorsum to normal," but our power to change is essential. As the poet Eleni Sikelianos puts it: "Poems maximize the adaptability of language, and, every bit nosotros know, adaptation is key to beast survival."
Allow Poetry Change Your Heed This National Poetry Month
The rules of language are e'er a little bit behind the people who apply information technology. Grammatical rules are an effort to capture a moment in time — to say, "Here's how we're doing it at present." We're alive, though. One time we've described "at present," it'due south already in the by, and we've moved on. Never mind the fact that at that place are thousands of languages operating with thousands of sets of rules.
This should be both liberating and humbling. Nosotros should exist costless to play around in our language, to manipulate it and alter it and see if we can get in work for us. On the other hand, we tin can never fully understand it — it's an organic matter, living and irresolute in response to the world of which it is a office. Conversations around what pronouns people utilise make it clear that this stuff produces a lot of cultural anxiety. I wish it wouldn't, and I recollect verse can help.
I'll terminate with an case from a poem called "Facing Information technology," by the corking 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 commencement of the verse form, the veteran sees his face in the granite and thinks: "I'g stone." And then the rest of the poem happens. By the end of it, he thinks: "I'm a window." It's not that the pain, or the horrors of war, or the cruelties of life have disappeared, it's simply that the verse form embodies a change in the bearing of the person. I call up near that a lot — about the importance of knowing both that I can modify my mind and that my mind can modify. This April, once once again, it 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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