Poetry--Pretty Words and More

A visual image by Carl Sandburg

 I'm not able to bypass Word Poetry Day 2018. OK, I hear groans from those who think they don't like poetry. Stop groaning and keep reading. I've heard naysayers utter things like Ahhh, poetry is a bunch of pretty words that mean nothing.

The first part of that statement is true but I take exception to the rest. 'Pretty words' is a succinct description but, most often, those words do mean something. The poet may find more meaning in his/her words than the reader. After all, the poet has lived the situation, seen the beauty, or experienced the soul-wrenching event. A good poet can make his/her reader find the same meaning. 

My friend, Ronda Miller, made me 'feel' her poem Moonstain (title poem in book of same title) so well that I sat with book in hand, stunned and saddened for this child's deep hurt when she finds a stillborn calf not long after the death of her own mother.She runs back to the farmhouse under the light of the blood moon where she cries. Pretty words? Yes, lovely phrases throughout but her poem did mean something and so do many others.

As readers, we need to give poetry a chance. As writers, we should try our hand at writing some. We all wrote those cutesy little poems when we were kids. You know the ones--they began with the lines

       Roses are red,

       Violets are blue,

Then we added two more lines trying to rhyme with the word 'blue'  Some were nice, some were funny, some were ridiculing. These little poems were often our introduction to writing poetry. We also copied other poems in the autograph books young girls passed around the classroom in grade school. One I remember clearly is

        "2-lips in the garden;

         2-lips in the park.

         But the 2-lips I like best, 

        are the 2-lips in the dark!" 

As we grew older, teachers made us memorize poems and that began to turn a good many students away from poetry. Others were drawn to it. It seems there was no middle ground. You enjoyed poems or you didn't. For some, it was a matter of never being able to understand the metaphors or the underlying sentiments of the poet. 

If you were one of those students, do yourself a favor and give reading poetry a try once again. Not one poem but several, or a book of collected poems. I'm not saying a miracle will occur and you are going to suddenly fall in love with poetry but you might begin to enjoy it more than you did years ago. 

One mistake readers make when reading poetry is that they read through once and then think What the heck was that all about? Never read a poem just once. Read it several times. You'll find more in it with each reading. Did you ever see a movie twice or a third time and saw many more little things in it than you did the first time? Same thing. The more we read, the more we see. 

If you're a prose writer, you owe it to yourself to give writing poetry a try. Your first efforts may be laughable. You might even think it 'stinks' but so was the first piece of prose you ever wrote, most likely. We learn as we go, whether it is writing poetry or prose. I've never had any formal training in writing poetry but I do enjoy writing a poem occasionally. Some have been pretty awful but a few others have had merit, have been published, have won a contest. I guarantee that, if I can do it, so can you.

On this World Poetry Day 2018, take a few minutes to look up a book of poetry on your shelf, or one online and read a few poems. Enjoy the 'pretty words' and then try writing a few of your own.