April is National Poetry Month. This 30 day celebration began in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. Initiated to highlight American poets and the art of poetry, National Poetry month has grown to be the largest literary recognition group. Yesterday, my blog post was titled The Birth of a Story, but a group of poets 20+ years ago birthed a movement to bring poetry into the spotlight, to encourage the reading and love of poetry, and to honor numerous American poets.
We can do three things with poetry--read it, write it, or ignore it. I have chosen the first two.
I didn't always love reading poetry. Like many students in high school, I tolerated it to complete my assignments. Much later in life, I developed an appreciation for those who could express so much in few words. What a prose writer might get across to the reader in 2,000 words, the poet can do in perhaps 130. That impressed me. The love of words drew me to poetry in my adult years.
I don't remember the first poem I wrote but I know that I wondered who I thought I was, that I could write a poem with no formal training whatsoever. I'd never read a book about writing poetry (still haven't!). What made me think I could do it? I figured out pretty quickly that anyone can write poetry, especially free verse, if they write from the heart. I don't attempt the finer forms that require certain numbers of syllables, certain types of rhythm and more--except for haiku. I have tried my hand at haiku. Some were awful; a few were not bad.
I wrote a narrative rhyming poem that was published in Boys' Quest, a magazine for middle grade boys. I also entered a poem in our state authors contest and won first place. If I can do that with no formal training, so can you. To be perfectly honest, many more of my poems have been rejected than have bee accepted. That's alright. It delighted me to have even a few published. I mentioned never having read a book on writing poetry, nor have I attended any poetry workshops. That doesn't mean you shouldn't. I might do so someday myself.
Our first exposure to poetry came with the nursery rhymes our mothers read to us, or recited from memory. I used them as a diversion many a time with my children when they were small. Then, we learned the silly rhyming poems that began with Roses are red, violets are blue....Next, we had teachers who made us memorize poems in English class. There were teachers who made us pick apart a poem to learn what the poet was actually trying to say. What were the hidden meanings? The metaphors? The reason for being? That may be when many kids turned off the attention button, some for good.
If you're one of those who selected ignore it from the three choices we have with poetry, give it another try. Do it with an open mind and the attitude that this time I am going to enjoy poetry. No one likes all poetry just as no one likes all short stories or all memoir pieces. In every kind of writing, we find things that appeal to us and those that do not. I heard a poet laureate of our state speak several years ago. The man was acclaimed for his poems. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about from the first sentence to the last that evening. Hearing his speech did not make me want to read his work. Even so, I knew there were plenty of other poets whose work I would enjoy reading.
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