Last week, we wondered – why isn’t poetry more popular? Here’s some of what you had to say.
Luisa G. wrote: “It seems to me that poetry has gotten a bad rap from the sort of thinking that says it's some kind of specialized, maybe even esoteric, knowledge that only people who've gone to school to study it can write (or read) effectively.
But in my 40+ years of teaching literature and creative writing, what I've tried to show students is that poetry is simply one of the many ways we can use language to connect (and in such an immediate way) to all the things that are most deeply human and vulnerable about ourselves and others.”
Martha A. wrote: “And what about you? When was the last time you read a poem to someone you loved? It very well may be that in today’s world poetry, like peace, begins at home.”
Nancy L. wrote: “It feels like poetry is gutted of its glory in U.S. schools from kindergarten. It’s treated like an inanimate literary object, when really poems are wildly living breathing creative beings. Poems get trimmed down to mechanics, intellectual removes, academic rubrics, detached from and devoid of the humans who said yes to birthing them onto pages. Our educational techniques do the same thing to ‘Foreign languages.’ Languages are channels for culture, which means they are portals to people and places and lands and stories and histories people in one culture would never otherwise had access to, know, or build any connections with.
Poems are the same. A language art form, sculpted and spun from the matter of humanness, then sent into the world on pages dedicated singularly to the extraordinary act of ensuring that the myriad ordinary moments that compose aliveness will be held, tended to, seen, known beyond their original bounds. I believe that the best poetry in some way says ‘have you considered how extraordinary it all is, all of this, especially the mundane, the in plain sight but missable, the messy, the mucky, the pain?’”
See you next week!
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