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 Poetry Month, I get a picayune nervous. I'chiliad a poet, and National Poetry Month makes me think about how fumbling and inarticulate I feel whenever someone asks me what I write poems about, or why I write poems, or what's so corking about poems. It'due south not that the questions are unfair, of course; it's just that I don't know the answers. I fell in love with poetry at some point in my life, long earlier I knew what it was or how to arrive. I know that poetry matters, but it's difficult for me to explain how or why.
This year, I'm thinking about that difficulty every bit National Poetry Month rolls around, and the springtime with it, and we sally — or, perchance, nosotros don't emerge — from years of a little more than social isolation than we're used to. We're changing, and yes, we're always changing, but at the moment, equally a civilization, it seems to me that nosotros're pretty uncomfortable about it. I believe poesy might offer u.s.a. some tools for embracing change, so I'chiliad going to give that a try here by explaining why the medium matters so much.
Poetry Is Common and Everywhere
First, permit's deal with the problem of our general perception of verse. We tend to recall of poesy as special or unusual, removed from the mundane happenings of everyday life. People read poems at special occasions similar weddings and funerals, or they larn about the poems and poets assigned to them in English language classes, or they come beyond bits of poetry memed in faux-inspirational Facebook posts.
I'thou not saying that stuff isn't poetry, but I'thou saying it's definitely not all of information technology. The earliest forms of poetry weren't written downwards but spoken aloud: not on the page, only in the body. Poetry was — and is — closely related to music, which we readily have is capable of making us feel without necessarily making sense. Information technology's thought that the primeval poems were cultural attempts to call up what needed to be remembered.
Put all this together, and you begin to sympathise verse as an entirely necessary piece of communication. It's an everyday thing. Like every day of your life, verse's full of experimentation and feeling. Information technology's trying to say what needs to exist said just in a way that's new, full of life, and able to exist remembered when nosotros demand information technology nearly.
Learning What You Already Know
I've had the feel 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 away, I happened to find an old verse form I wrote that had some lines about credence and memory. I'd been feeling overwhelmed and lamentable nearly her death, but of a sudden my own poem, coming to me from out of the past, seemed helpful. I felt nearly like I fourth dimension-traveled back to the past to make sure I jotted down the thoughts I'd demand in the future. Almost.
Poesy is useful in other means, though. The way we experience the earth is completely entangled in the language nosotros use to draw it. That linguistic communication is largely metaphorical, and poetry is neat at coming up with metaphors. When you have lost someone, your middle breaks. When y'all finally sympathize something, you see the lite. When you're feeling wonderful, you might even be glowing. These statements are not literally truthful, but they feel even truer than true. The comparison amplifies the truth.
Information technology's fortunate for us that language works this way, because information technology means information technology's capable of changing as information technology adapts to the way we feel the earth — equally our frames of reference change, and equally our available comparisons change. Linguistic communication adapts whether nosotros resist that accommodation or not, but more and more than, it seems to me that nosotros're agape of irresolute. The pandemic, our politics, and a million other things take us using a lot of language most "getting back to normal," but our power to change is essential. As the poet Eleni Sikelianos puts it: "Poems maximize the adaptability of language, and, as nosotros know, adaptation is key to brute survival."
Allow Poetry Change Your Mind This National Poesy Month
The rules of linguistic communication are always a piffling chip behind the people who use information technology. Grammatical rules are an attempt to capture a moment in time — to say, "Here's how we're doing it now." We're alive, though. One time nosotros've described "now," information technology's 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 free to play around in our linguistic communication, to manipulate it and change information technology and see if we can brand information technology work for usa. On the other hand, nosotros tin never fully understand it — it'due south an organic thing, living and changing in response to the world of which information technology is a office. Conversations around what pronouns people apply make it clear that this stuff produces a lot of cultural anxiety. I wish it wouldn't, and I think poetry tin can aid.
I'll end with an example from a poem called "Facing It," by the bully 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'g rock." Then the rest of the poem happens. Past the terminate of it, he thinks: "I'm a window." It'southward not that the pain, or the horrors of state of war, or the cruelties of life accept disappeared, it'due south simply that the poem embodies a change in the bearing of the person. I think about that a lot — about the importance of knowing both that I can change my mind and that my listen can change. 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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