Here Comes Again Again I Let You Back in
Whenever April comes around, and I realize that information technology'southward National Poetry Month, I go a little nervous. I'm a poet, and National Poesy Month makes me think well-nigh how fumbling and inarticulate I feel whenever someone asks me what I write poems almost, or why I write poems, or what'due south then swell about poems. Information technology'due south not that the questions are unfair, of form; it's merely 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 make it. I know that poetry matters, but it's difficult for me to explicate how or why.
This twelvemonth, I'yard thinking about that difficulty as National Poetry Month rolls around, and the springtime with it, and we emerge — or, possibly, nosotros don't emerge — from years of a little more social isolation than nosotros're used to. Nosotros're changing, and yes, we're always irresolute, but at the moment, as a culture, it seems to me that we're pretty uncomfortable almost information technology. I believe poetry might offer us some tools for embracing change, so I'm going to give that a try hither past explaining why the medium matters then much.
Poetry Is Common and Everywhere
First, let's deal with the problem of our general perception of poetry. We tend to think 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 acquire about the poems and poets assigned to them in English classes, or they come up across bits of poetry memed in faux-inspirational Facebook posts.
I'm non saying that stuff isn't poetry, simply I'chiliad maxim it'due south definitely not all of it. The earliest forms of verse weren't written down merely spoken aloud: not on the page, just in the body. Poetry was — and is — closely related to music, which nosotros readily accept is capable of making us experience without necessarily making sense. It's thought that the primeval poems were cultural attempts to remember what needed to be remembered.
Put all this together, and you begin to empathise poetry as an entirely necessary slice of communication. It's an everyday affair. Like every 24-hour interval of your life, poetry's full of experimentation and feeling. It'south trying to say what needs to exist said merely in a way that'due south new, full of life, and able to exist remembered when we need it most.
Learning What Y'all Already Know
I've had the experience now and over again of going back to expect 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 poem I wrote that had some lines about credence and retentivity. I'd been feeling overwhelmed and sad about her death, only suddenly my own poem, coming to me from out of the past, seemed helpful. I felt well-nigh similar I time-traveled back to the by to make certain I jotted down the thoughts I'd need in the future. Almost.
Poetry is useful in other means, though. The manner nosotros experience the world is completely entangled in the language we apply to describe it. That language is largely metaphorical, and poesy is great at coming up with metaphors. When you take lost someone, your heart breaks. When you finally understand something, you lot run across the lite. When you're feeling wonderful, you might fifty-fifty be glowing. These statements are not literally truthful, merely they feel even truer than true. 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 we experience the world — as our frames of reference change, and equally our available comparisons change. Language adapts whether we resist that adaptation or not, but more and more, it seems to me that we're afraid of changing. The pandemic, our politics, and a million other things have us using a lot of language most "getting back to normal," but our ability to change is essential. As the poet Eleni Sikelianos puts it: "Poems maximize the adaptability of language, and, as we know, adaptation is key to animal survival."
Let Poetry Change Your Mind This National Verse Month
The rules of language are always a little scrap 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 information technology at present." Nosotros're live, though. In one case we've described "now," information technology's 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 complimentary to play around in our language, to dispense it and change it and encounter if we can make it work for us. On the other hand, we tin can never fully understand it — it's an organic thing, living and changing in response to the world of which it is a part. Conversations around what pronouns people utilize go far clear that this stuff produces a lot of cultural anxiety. I wish it wouldn't, and I call up verse can help.
I'll finish with an instance from a poem chosen "Facing It," by the great 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'm stone." So the rest of the poem happens. By the end of it, he thinks: "I'thou a window." Information technology'south non that the pain, or the horrors of state of war, or the cruelties of life take disappeared, it'southward simply that the poem embodies a change in the bearing of the person. I retrieve about that a lot — almost the importance of knowing both that I can change my listen and that my mind tin can change. This April, 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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