...after a conversation with my mother who taught me to appreciate it:
When I taught the poetry class last fall, the curriculum described poetry, in part, as "compressed thought." And so it is. Good poetry, at least, prevents you from saying "getting rid of things" to propel you to a better word such as "eradicate." And then it challenges you to use it in conjunction with other works like "enumerate" or "predicate." All the while, demanding further restraints of dactyl or pentameter. It would seem, at first glance, that the number of literary requirements upon good poetry would make it almost impossible to achieve something noteworthy, and yet there are hundreds (thousands) of poems that exquisitely capture the emotions of universal moments better than entire volumes often do. Poetry expresses only what must be said about a topic and does it more eloquently. The constraints improve the product.
And such is life - or can be... We recoil and rebel against rules and restrictions. We think our lives are always expressed best in unrestricted free verse. But what if disciplines and denials of self actually force us to become our better selves, weeding out the habits and pastimes of ease and luxury to find better thoughts and grander actions? The very things we think will stifle and stunt us, instead became the things that shape us into deliberate existences that inspire and encourage all who stop to read the pages of our lives.
When I taught the poetry class last fall, the curriculum described poetry, in part, as "compressed thought." And so it is. Good poetry, at least, prevents you from saying "getting rid of things" to propel you to a better word such as "eradicate." And then it challenges you to use it in conjunction with other works like "enumerate" or "predicate." All the while, demanding further restraints of dactyl or pentameter. It would seem, at first glance, that the number of literary requirements upon good poetry would make it almost impossible to achieve something noteworthy, and yet there are hundreds (thousands) of poems that exquisitely capture the emotions of universal moments better than entire volumes often do. Poetry expresses only what must be said about a topic and does it more eloquently. The constraints improve the product.
And such is life - or can be... We recoil and rebel against rules and restrictions. We think our lives are always expressed best in unrestricted free verse. But what if disciplines and denials of self actually force us to become our better selves, weeding out the habits and pastimes of ease and luxury to find better thoughts and grander actions? The very things we think will stifle and stunt us, instead became the things that shape us into deliberate existences that inspire and encourage all who stop to read the pages of our lives.
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