Let Me Try Again
Whenever April comes effectually, and I realize that information technology'south National Poetry Month, I get a trivial nervous. I'g a poet, and National Poetry Calendar 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'southward and then great about poems. It's non that the questions are unfair, of course; it's just that I don't know the answers. I brutal in love with poesy at some point in my life, long earlier I knew what it was or how to make it. I know that poetry matters, just it'southward hard for me to explain how or why.
This twelvemonth, I'one thousand thinking nearly that difficulty as National Poetry Month rolls around, and the springtime with information technology, and nosotros emerge — or, possibly, nosotros don't emerge — from years of a fiddling more than social isolation than we're used to. We're changing, and yes, we're always changing, simply at the moment, every bit a civilisation, 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 try hither past explaining why the medium matters so much.
Verse Is Common and Everywhere
Outset, let'south bargain with the problem of our full 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 run across bits of poetry memed in simulated-inspirational Facebook posts.
I'm not saying that stuff isn't poetry, but I'1000 proverb it's definitely not all of it. The earliest forms of verse weren't written down but spoken aloud: not on the page, simply in the body. Poetry was — and is — closely related to music, which we readily accept is capable of making the states feel without necessarily making sense. Information technology's thought that the earliest poems were cultural attempts to remember what needed to exist remembered.
Put all this together, and you begin to understand verse every bit an entirely necessary piece of communication. It'due south an everyday thing. Like every day of your life, poetry'due south full of experimentation and feeling. It's trying to say what needs to be said but in a way that's new, full of life, and able to be remembered when we need information technology most.
Learning What You Already Know
I've had the experience now and once more of going dorsum to look at something I wrote years agone and realizing that it contains information I've been needing. When my grandmother passed away, I happened to find an old poem I wrote that had some lines about acceptance and memory. I'd been feeling overwhelmed and sad nigh her death, but of a sudden my own poem, coming to me from out of the past, seemed helpful. I felt virtually like I time-traveled back to the past to brand sure I jotted downward the thoughts I'd need in the futurity. Almost.
Poetry is useful in other ways, though. The way we feel the world is completely entangled in the language we employ to describe it. That language is largely metaphorical, and verse is great at coming upwards with metaphors. When you have lost someone, your heart breaks. When you lot finally understand something, y'all encounter the light. When y'all're feeling wonderful, you might even be glowing. These statements are not literally true, but they feel even truer than truthful. The comparison amplifies the truth.
It's fortunate for us that language works this way, because it means it's capable of changing as it adapts to the way nosotros experience the world — as our frames of reference alter, and as our available comparisons change. Language adapts whether we resist that adaptation or not, only more and more, it seems to me that we're afraid of changing. The pandemic, our politics, and a 1000000 other things have us using a lot of language about "getting dorsum to normal," merely our ability to change is essential. As the poet Eleni Sikelianos puts it: "Poems maximize the adjustability of language, and, every bit we know, adaptation is fundamental to animate being survival."
Permit Verse Modify Your Mind This National Poetry Month
The rules of language are always a fiddling bit backside the people who use it. Grammatical rules are an attempt to capture a moment in time — to say, "Hither'due south how we're doing information technology now." We're alive, though. In one case nosotros've described "now," information technology'southward already in the past, and nosotros've moved on. Never mind the fact that there are thousands of languages operating with thousands of sets of rules.
This should exist both liberating and humbling. We should be costless to play effectually in our language, to manipulate information technology and alter information technology and see if we can make information technology work for u.s.a.. On the other hand, we can never fully understand it — it's an organic thing, living and changing in response to the world of which information technology is a office. Conversations around what pronouns people use make it articulate that this stuff produces a lot of cultural anxiety. I wish it wouldn't, and I think poetry tin assist.
I'll end with an case from a verse form chosen "Facing It," by the bang-up American poet Yusef Komunyakaa. In the poem, a veteran of the state of war in Vietnam is looking at his reflection in the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
At the get-go of the verse form, the veteran sees his face in the granite and thinks: "I'm stone." Then the residue of the poem happens. By the end of it, he thinks: "I'g a window." It's not that the hurting, or the horrors of war, or the cruelties of life have disappeared, it's just that the verse form embodies a change in the bearing of the person. I think about that a lot — nigh the importance of knowing both that I tin can change my heed and that my mind can alter. This April, once again, it feels good to be reminded.
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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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