Let It Go In 50 Languages
Whenever April comes effectually, and I realize that information technology's National Poetry Month, I get a picayune nervous. I'thou a poet, and National Verse Month makes me think nigh how fumbling and inarticulate I experience whenever someone asks me what I write poems well-nigh, or why I write poems, or what'due south and so great about poems. Information technology's non that the questions are unfair, of course; information technology's just that I don't know the answers. I fell in love with poesy at some point in my life, long before I knew what information technology was or how to go far. I know that poetry matters, but it'south difficult for me to explain how or why.
This twelvemonth, I'm thinking about that difficulty as National Poesy Month rolls effectually, and the springtime with information technology, and nosotros emerge — or, possibly, we don't sally — from years of a little more social isolation than we're used to. We're irresolute, and yes, we're always changing, just at the moment, every bit a culture, it seems to me that nosotros're pretty uncomfortable about it. I believe poetry might offer us some tools for embracing change, so I'm going to give that a endeavor here by explaining why the medium matters so much.
Poetry Is Common and Everywhere
First, let's deal with the problem of our full 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 like weddings and funerals, or they learn about the poems and poets assigned to them in English classes, or they come up across bits of verse memed in false-inspirational Facebook posts.
I'chiliad not maxim that stuff isn't verse, but I'grand saying information technology's definitely not all of it. The earliest forms of poetry weren't written down but spoken aloud: not on the page, but in the body. Poetry was — and is — closely related to music, which we readily accept is capable of making usa experience without necessarily making sense. Information technology's thought that the earliest poems were cultural attempts to recollect what needed to be remembered.
Put all this together, and you brainstorm to understand verse as an entirely necessary piece of communication. It's an everyday thing. Like every day of your life, poesy's total of experimentation and feeling. It's trying to say what needs to be said but in a way that'south new, total of life, and able to be remembered when we need it most.
I've had the experience now and again of going back to look at something I wrote years agone and realizing that information technology contains information I've been needing. When my grandmother passed away, I happened to observe an old poem I wrote that had some lines about acceptance and retentiveness. I'd been feeling overwhelmed and sad nearly her death, just of a sudden my own poem, coming to me from out of the past, seemed helpful. I felt almost like I fourth dimension-traveled back to the past to make certain I jotted down the thoughts I'd need in the hereafter. About.
Verse is useful in other ways, though. The manner we experience the world is completely entangled in the language we apply to draw it. That language is largely metaphorical, and poetry is bully at coming up with metaphors. When yous have lost someone, your heart breaks. When you finally empathise something, you run across the light. When you're feeling wonderful, you might even exist glowing. These statements are not literally truthful, only they experience fifty-fifty truer than truthful. The comparison amplifies the truth.
It's fortunate for us that language works this way, because it means information technology'south capable of changing as it adapts to the way we experience the world — as our frames of reference change, and every bit our available comparisons change. Language adapts whether nosotros resist that adaptation or not, merely more and more, information technology seems to me that we're afraid of changing. The pandemic, our politics, and a million other things have the states using a lot of linguistic communication about "getting back to normal," but our ability to change is essential. As the poet Eleni Sikelianos puts information technology: "Poems maximize the adaptability of language, and, equally we know, adaptation is central to animate being survival."
Let Verse Change Your Mind This National Poetry Month
The rules of linguistic communication are always a piffling bit backside the people who use it. Grammatical rules are an effort to capture a moment in time — to say, "Here'southward how we're doing it now." We're alive, though. Once nosotros've described "now," it'due south 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 be both liberating and humbling. We should be free to play around in our language, to manipulate it and alter information technology and see if nosotros can make it work for us. On the other hand, we can never fully sympathize it — it's an organic thing, living and changing in response to the earth of which it is a part. Conversations around what pronouns people use make information technology clear that this stuff produces a lot of cultural feet. I wish it wouldn't, and I think poetry tin can help.
I'll cease with an example from a poem chosen "Facing Information technology," by the keen 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 showtime of the verse form, the veteran sees his face in the granite and thinks: "I'g stone." Then the rest of the poem happens. By the stop of it, he thinks: "I'm a window." Information technology's not that the hurting, or the horrors of war, or the cruelties of life accept disappeared, it's merely that the poem embodies a change in the begetting of the person. I think about that a lot — almost the importance of knowing both that I can change my listen and that my heed can alter. This April, once again, information technology 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&ueid=61d108d6-1435-47f4-a710-9c712316907b
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