When I was a senior in high school, we were allowed to pick our English class. I was the only one in my friend group that chose Poetry. I remember dreading having to sit through fifty-five whole minutes of a class where I couldn’t share looks of annoyance with one of my friends—because we were seniors, soon to be in college—and the last thing I wanted to do was try to make new friends when I was on my way out of town. But walking into that class alone on the first day of school changed my life.
Before I took the class, I believed that poetry was all fluff—just rhymes about rainbows and flowers and love and the stars and two teenagers killing themselves because they weren’t allowed to get married (@Shakespeare). I soon realized that yes, poetry could be about that, but it was also so much more. Poetry is about expressing yourself in a completely raw form and using phrases other than “the sky is blue.” Poetry is a reminder that it is okay to feel pain. Poetry is supposed to evoke emotion. Poetry is a reminder that we are human.
In that high school poetry class, I learned something about my peers and myself: even though all of us acted like a hard-ass on the outside, we were all real poets on the inside. In that class of 24 there were jocks, geeks, popular kids, gym rats, brainiacs and a kid obsessed with anime. Though we were all different, we shared a poetry class that allowed us to break out of our mold and into our poetic form. We became so comfortable expressing our real emotion with each other. Every single one of us shocked the class with a poem at one point or another. Through the class, I found I was able to understand the perspectives of so many lives. People I only knew the names of at the beginning of the year became people I was emotionally invested in because I was forced to try to understand the experiences he/she had to deal with. Before the class, I was aware of the hardships my classmates dealt with, but the poetry class let me experience the same emotions they had through their poetry.
Since high school, I have taken two more poetry classes, and all three have had the same rules: to listen to the poetry with an open mind, and to write without hesitation. Because of these classes, my writing has strengthened, my listening skills have improved and my public speaking have developed immensely. My poetry classes forced me to view the world with a different set of eyes and have taught me to accept criticism with open arms.
Critical thinking, writing and public speaking are so necessary in the workforce, and my poetry classes have enabled me to sharpen those tools. I highly recommend taking a poetry class. Hopefully it changes your life the way it changed mine.
