Get It Up Lets Do It Again
Whenever April comes effectually, and I realize that information technology's National Poetry Calendar month, I get a piffling nervous. I'm a poet, and National Verse Month makes me call up about how fumbling and inarticulate I experience whenever someone asks me what I write poems about, or why I write poems, or what'southward so great near poems. It's not that the questions are unfair, of course; it's just that I don't know the answers. I roughshod in dearest with poetry at some point in my life, long earlier I knew what it was or how to make it. I know that poetry matters, simply it's difficult for me to explain how or why.
This year, I'm thinking well-nigh that difficulty as National Poetry Month rolls effectually, and the springtime with it, and nosotros emerge — or, maybe, we don't emerge — from years of a lilliputian more social isolation than nosotros're used to. We're changing, and yes, we're e'er changing, but at the moment, as a culture, information technology seems to me that nosotros're pretty uncomfortable near information technology. I believe poesy might offer united states of america some tools for embracing change, and so I'chiliad going to give that a effort hither by explaining why the medium matters and so much.
Poetry Is Common and Everywhere
First, permit's deal with the trouble of our general perception of poetry. We tend to call back of verse 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 across $.25 of poetry memed in faux-inspirational Facebook posts.
I'1000 not saying that stuff isn't poetry, but I'm maxim information technology'south definitely not all of information technology. The earliest forms of poetry weren't written downwardly simply spoken aloud: not on the page, merely in the body. Poetry was — and is — closely related to music, which we readily have is capable of making usa feel without necessarily making sense. It's thought that the earliest poems were cultural attempts to think what needed to be remembered.
Put all this together, and you begin to understand poetry as an entirely necessary slice of advice. It'southward an everyday affair. Like every 24-hour interval of your life, poesy'southward full of experimentation and feeling. Information technology's trying to say what needs to exist said just in a style that'due 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 data I've been needing. When my grandmother passed abroad, I happened to find an quondam poem I wrote that had some lines near credence and retentivity. I'd been feeling overwhelmed and sorry about her death, only suddenly my own poem, coming to me from out of the past, seemed helpful. I felt most like I time-traveled dorsum to the by to make sure I jotted down the thoughts I'd need in the future. Nigh.
Poetry is useful in other means, though. The way nosotros experience the world is completely entangled in the linguistic communication we use to describe it. That linguistic communication is largely metaphorical, and poetry is great at coming upward with metaphors. When you take lost someone, your heart breaks. When you finally understand something, you lot see the calorie-free. When you're feeling wonderful, you might fifty-fifty be glowing. These statements are not literally true, but they feel even truer than true. The comparison amplifies the truth.
It's fortunate for usa that language works this style, 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 modify. Language adapts whether we resist that adaptation or not, but more and more than, information technology seems to me that nosotros're afraid of irresolute. The pandemic, our politics, and a million other things take us using a lot of language about "getting dorsum to normal," but our ability to alter is essential. Every bit the poet Eleni Sikelianos puts it: "Poems maximize the adjustability of language, and, equally we know, accommodation is key to animal survival."
Let Poesy Alter Your Mind This National Poetry Month
The rules of language are always a piffling flake backside the people who use information technology. Grammatical rules are an attempt to capture a moment in fourth dimension — to say, "Here'south how nosotros're doing it now." We're live, though. In one case we've described "now," it'south already in the by, and nosotros've moved on. Never listen 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 complimentary to play around in our linguistic communication, to manipulate it and alter it and come across if nosotros tin make it work for us. On the other hand, nosotros can never fully understand it — information technology's an organic thing, living and changing in response to the world of which it is a part. Conversations around what pronouns people use go far 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 instance from a poem chosen "Facing It," by the swell 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 in the granite and thinks: "I'one thousand stone." And so the remainder of the verse form happens. By the end of it, he thinks: "I'yard a window." It'southward not that the pain, or the horrors of war, or the cruelties of life take disappeared, it's just that the poem embodies a modify in the bearing of the person. I recall about that a lot — about the importance of knowing both that I tin can change my listen and that my mind can modify. This April, once again, it feels proficient to exist 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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