I don’t want to do another blog post where I trash poetry and credit it with everything wrong in my life. Instead, I decided to shift gears and sort of think about the impact that poetry has on modern society. Typically poetry is associated with twisted words and meaning, a maze of meaning that you have to dig 900 times to make some sense of. But when we did the newer poems and poets who are under the age of 60 it sort of started clearing out.
This entire week we sort of focused on the mentor poets and all the poets were supposed to be alive (and not just in spirit), and were therefore speaking mostly in the same form as me. As in they weren’t using “thine” “thee” words but normal everyday words. What really sort of stood out to me while listening and reading poems from various poets and my own mentor poet was that they spoke about relatable issues that I am either familiar with or have a good understanding of. I have spoken (written (?)) about how poetry is used to talk about deep-steeped issues in society, because it gives writers that freedom and creativity with metaphors, imagery, and all that fun stuff, but after listening to Ada Limon’s poem about biracial being used as a grant seeking aspect, or after Paul Tran’s poem about racial issues and the problems refugees go through even after they have found refuge. These poets are able to skillfully empower their words, where each word is adding meaning to the script. There aren’t words being used as fillers because poetry is about getting the message across concisely.
Poetry does in 500 words what books try to do in 1000, and in our day with the attention span and the readily available distraction poems are even more important because they hide complexity and depth in already deep work.
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