If you have known me for a long time, you know that I don't necessarily love poetry. There is a lot of big words, deep meanings, and sometimes plain jargon that can make a poem incredibly hard to read, let alone understand. I never really liked poetry and that dislike has grown since my Junior year of high school. That is, until now.
I declared my minor in college to be Creative Writing. I had to take at least one poetry course to fulfill all the requirements. I was immediately annoyed by that and was incredibly reluctant to finish the minor. But, I figured that I would also end up teaching poetry to my future students, so I buckled down and enrolled in an introductory course this past semester.
My professor was the most energetic, positive, uplifting person I had ever met. I was immediately annoyed, to say the least. In the first few weeks of the course, I was reluctant to share any poetry I wrote and I didn't put in a large amount of effort. But then we were assigned a project to write our poem, about anything we wanted.
I had the assignment for weeks and kept coming up with nothing. It took many weeks of struggling with topics before my creative side won out. It was the night before the assignment was due when I had, what I have come to acknowledge, my poetry epiphany. In 20 minutes, I wrote one of my best poems so far in my young writing career.After that assignment, I then saw poetry in a whole new light.
Poetry isn't just words on a page and fancy words for specific meanings, Poetry is life, and life is poetry. A poem can capture any feeling, any emotion, any thing and express it in words. It can take the hardest heartbreaks or the funniest of moments and lay it all out on a sheet of paper.Poetry has been around since the start of human civilization.
There is poetry in everything, from the songs of the spring-time birds to the waves of the ocean on the beaches during the summer to the crunch of the colorful autumn leaves to the crackle of wood-burning fires in the middle of winter. From a first date to wedding bells, from sips of coffee to full nights out at the bar, in the laughter of children to the cries of adults, instilled in the classroom, workplace, and homes.
Poetry lives within every one of us, poetry is us. It is all around us, all the time. Poetry can change lives, it certainly has changed mine. There is simple beauty in the most complex of things and the most complex beauty in the simplest of things. The world, and everything in it, is your topic. So, what will you write about?
