Think about poetry. Try not to let that thought draw you back to 7 a.m. in an oddly damp and painfully bright high school classroom where someone tells you that Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all time. (He is honestly JUST A GUY, but that is a tangent for a later day.)
Try to think about poetry outside of iambic pentameter and descriptions of far too many flowers, because the truth is that isn’t all that there is to poetry.
While Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Shel Silverstein, and Robert Frost are all poets who paved the way for what poetry is now, poetry has evolved just as language itself has. It’s diversified, it’s become far more accessible, and thanks to spoken word and slam poetry, it is now a lot more than words on a page.
It gets overlooked more often than not, as an old word form with too many rules that a lot of people dread in its entirety. However, it can be a powerful tool to help us understand ourselves and the world around us.
Poetry is meant to be an expressive art, and there is no wrong way to write it. You can use as many or as few words as you see fit, with as much imagery and as many stylistic choices as you would like.
A crowning trait, however, is that poets possess a remarkable ability to find small details. They are known for searching out the single flower growing in between slabs of concrete, or the single ray of light between the clouds. They find the meaning in individual words, or even in individual commas and periods.
At a time when many are finding a rise in struggles with mental health, attributes like that serve as a useful skill for finding the good in the vast amount of struggles we are facing in modern society.
When you take time to write about your feeling and experiences in the world around you, you gain a better understanding of how your mind works. In better understanding your own mind, you are likely to gain an idea of how others may see the world too. This builds community and builds compassion. All of these things are useful in all facets of life, whether you are going into a writing-heavy field or are studying to be a mechanical engineer.
If you’ve made it this far, you have a challenge for the week: try to write a poem about anything. Write about what type of weather you feel like in as much detail as you can, write a letter to your past or present self, or a letter to your greatest fear. Write about what you think love is, or perhaps even what it isn’t. Write about a memory that you would bottle, and the types of feelings you would drink if you could. Write something that allows you to express your emotions, positive or negative.
Words are the most powerful thing in existence, we have the power to create any emotion or say anything exactly the way we want to.
Think about poetry. Now define it for yourself.