We all have read a poem before, whether through children’s books or in an English class. They have ranged from the basic ABAB rhyme poems to sonnets and even full-length plays that are considered poetry. Some of us are big fans of poems, while others see them as something that is easy to come up with and not as in-depth as a story may be, but this isn’t the case. When you go beyond what you may have read as a child and explore the many levels of poetry, you realize that they can pack a strong, and even mightier, punch than many stories, and in less words, too.
I attended an arts high school that featured classes from dance to visual arts and even theatre, but I preferred the classes in literary arts. Up into my senior year, I only saw myself as a fiction writer—too boring for nonfiction and not impressed by my previous encounters with poetry. However, I took a leap of faith and signed up for my school’s introductory poetry class my last year of high school, and it was the best experience I ever had. There, I learned about many contemporary poets, poets who used their work to display tough issues, like those involving medical dilemmas, embracing your heritage and culture, and discovering your identity. I was introduced to the worlds of Lucille Clifton and Marcus Wicker, poets I never would’ve looked into myself if it wasn’t for the class, and their work has impacted me as a person and as a writer.
While taking this class, and now in its aftermath, I found myself looking for the poetry section in bookstores, wanting to discover more poets you don’t learn about in most general English classes. Each time, I was disappointed to see skimpy sections with only historically important poetry that you’d be forced to read in school, and maybe one contemporary poet who’s breaking the barrier to be sold on the shelves of stores. It made me think of why they don’t sell as many non-historical poetry books as they do fiction and nonfiction, and I realized it was because people weren’t drawn to poetry for the reasons I wasn’t drawn to it at first.
Like many, I was unaware of how impactful a poem can be, how poems can stick with you like a song during rough patches of your life. In one of my college English classes that focuses on the English major itself, we talked about how poems were once so important to the everyday lives of people, that they used to share them in public logs and dedicate powerful ones to memory just to have. When asked how many of us had to memorize and recite a poem for a class, only half of my fellow 100+ students raised their hands along with me, but those who did remembered the name and context of the poem they had. One man in the class, who mentioned he went to high school in the 1980s, recited his full poem in completion on spot for all of us, because it had stuck with him all these years.
Even though poems may be shorter in length, their weight on our lives can remain with us. Poems pack punches that you sometimes don’t get hit with until the very last line. They can be concise and strong, or long and thoughtful, but a good poem will always leave you with something. Poems evoke emotions within us that we may not want to deal with. They can make us cry, remind us of our past, and inspire us all at the same time, and I can’t wait for the day when everyone realizes how much might poetry can have.
