I am a writer. I enjoy writing and reading, but I never really enjoyed poetry until I took a creative writing class.
I remember in middle school English class we did a unit on poetry and had to write beginner level poems in a portfolio. We needed a limerick, a haiku, and various other forms of poetry. I hated it. I made up poems that I hated. I still got an A on the project, but never wanted anything to do with poetry again.
I didn’t really have to encounter it again until college. I decided to take a creative writing class because, well, I like writing. In the class, we had two units: fiction (yes!) and poetry (ew). I was excited about fiction, much less excited and actually worried for poetry. The fiction unit went by fine, it was actually a bit harder than I expected, but I learned a lot about how to actually write fiction. Then came the poetry unit. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
My teacher started each class with a warm-up writing activity and when we started our poetry unit she started off with a prompt where we had to write a poem. Fiction I could handle, I knew what I was doing, but poetry, how did this work?
There aren’t rules in poetry unless you put them there or decide to follow them. That was a crazy concept to me because that wasn’t what I learned in seventh-grade English. I also knew poems didn’t have to rhyme, but my only experience with poetry was Dr. Seuss and that seventh-grade English class. I quickly learned so much.
I learned that the quotes I’d been pinning on Pinterest for over a year were actually poems and many were by this anonymous poet named Atticus. I learned the art of free verse and that there are many ways to write poetry. Poetry often stems from a feeling and getting that feeling on to paper- or at least that’s where my poetry comes from.
Over the course of half a semester I wrote many poems but in the end could only turn in my best three. I spent hours editing these poems, changing the words, trying to figure out exactly which layout would convey the meaning I wanted it to. Punctuation is heavy in poetry, it’s best to use it very carefully and meaningfully.
In fiction, you have time to write about your meaning, in poetry you don’t. Every single word and mark is deliberate or should be anyways. I learned to love and appreciate poetry, and I didn’t really realize all I had learned until I tried to introduce my friend to the poetry books of Rupi Kaur.
She opened the book and told me she didn’t really understand poetry or how to read it. My eyes widened as I realized I had so much to tell her about this new world of words.
Poetry is an art form like no other. It’s a mix of writing and the visual arts. It matters equally how the poem looks as to what it says. When you write poetry, you might have an intended meaning, but each person who reads it is going to read it and apply it to their lives, find meaning in their own experiences. Fiction does that, too but in a different way. In fiction, you’re often taken into the world of the story and can feel what the character feels. In poetry you become the story.
If I hadn’t taken that class I would have never discovered how much I actually enjoyed poetry, both reading and writing it. I think it is a class everyone should take once in their life, or at least spend some time learning about. There is so much more to poetry than rules and rhyming. There is so much meaning you can take out of one poem, one stanza, one line, or even one word. Poetry speaks to everyone, and it’s quite beautiful once you understand it.
