Poetry Analysis of Let America Be America Again
Whenever Apr comes around, and I realize that information technology's National Poetry Month, I get a picayune nervous. I'm a poet, and National Verse Month makes me call back near how fumbling and inarticulate I feel whenever someone asks me what I write poems near, or why I write poems, or what'south and so dandy well-nigh poems. It's non that the questions are unfair, of form; it's merely that I don't know the answers. I fell in dearest with verse at some point in my life, long earlier I knew what information technology was or how to make it. I know that verse matters, but it's difficult for me to explicate how or why.
This year, I'm thinking about that difficulty as National Poetry Month rolls around, and the springtime with information technology, and we emerge — or, possibly, nosotros don't emerge — from years of a footling more social isolation than we're used to. We're irresolute, and yes, we're always changing, but at the moment, equally a civilization, it seems to me that we're pretty uncomfortable virtually information technology. I believe poetry might offer us some tools for embracing change, so I'm going to give that a try here by explaining why the medium matters and so much.
Poetry Is Common and Everywhere
First, permit's bargain with the trouble of our general perception of poetry. We tend to retrieve of poetry equally special or unusual, removed from the mundane happenings of everyday life. People read poems at special occasions like weddings and funerals, or they larn well-nigh the poems and poets assigned to them in English classes, or they come beyond $.25 of poetry memed in faux-inspirational Facebook posts.
I'm non maxim that stuff isn't verse, but I'm saying information technology's definitely not all of information technology. The earliest forms of poetry weren't written down but spoken aloud: non on the page, but in the trunk. Poetry was — and is — closely related to music, which we readily have is capable of making u.s.a. feel without necessarily making sense. Information technology'south thought that the primeval poems were cultural attempts to remember what needed to exist remembered.
Put all this together, and yous brainstorm to sympathise verse as an entirely necessary piece of advice. It's an everyday affair. Similar every day of your life, poetry's full of experimentation and feeling. It's trying to say what needs to be said but in a way that's new, full of life, and able to exist remembered when nosotros demand it well-nigh.
Learning What You Already Know
I've had the feel now and again of going back to look at something I wrote years ago and realizing that information technology contains information I've been needing. When my grandmother passed away, I happened to find an old poem I wrote that had some lines nigh acceptance and memory. I'd been feeling overwhelmed and pitiful about her death, just suddenly my own poem, coming to me from out of the by, seemed helpful. I felt nigh like I time-traveled dorsum to the past to brand sure I jotted down the thoughts I'd demand in the future. Almost.
Poetry is useful in other ways, though. The way nosotros experience the world is completely entangled in the language nosotros use to describe it. That language is largely metaphorical, and poetry is great at coming up with metaphors. When yous take lost someone, your heart breaks. When you finally understand something, y'all run into the lite. When yous're feeling wonderful, you might fifty-fifty be glowing. These statements are not literally truthful, but they feel even truer than true. The comparison amplifies the truth.
It'southward fortunate for united states that language works this way, because it means information technology's capable of changing as information technology adapts to the mode nosotros feel the world — as our frames of reference change, and as our available comparisons change. Language adapts whether we resist that adaptation or non, but more and more, it seems to me that we're agape of irresolute. The pandemic, our politics, and a million other things have us using a lot of language most "getting back to normal," but our power to alter is essential. As the poet Eleni Sikelianos puts it: "Poems maximize the adaptability of language, and, as we know, adaptation is primal to animal survival."
Permit Poetry Change Your Mind This National Poetry Calendar month
The rules of language are e'er a petty bit behind the people who use it. Grammatical rules are an attempt to capture a moment in time — to say, "Hither's how nosotros're doing it at present." We're alive, though. One time nosotros've described "now," it's already in the by, and we've moved on. Never heed the fact that there are thousands of languages operating with thousands of sets of rules.
This should exist both liberating and humbling. We should be costless to play around in our linguistic communication, to manipulate it and alter information technology and see if we tin can arrive piece of work for us. On the other hand, we can never fully empathise it — it'due south an organic thing, living and changing in response to the earth of which it is a office. Conversations around what pronouns people utilise arrive articulate that this stuff produces a lot of cultural feet. I wish information technology wouldn't, and I think poetry can help.
I'll end with an case from a poem called "Facing It," past the great American poet Yusef Komunyakaa. In the poem, a veteran of the state of war in Vietnam is looking at his reflection in the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
At the first of the poem, the veteran sees his face up in the granite and thinks: "I'm stone." Then the rest of the poem happens. By the end of information technology, he thinks: "I'm a window." It's not that the pain, or the horrors of war, or the cruelties of life have disappeared, it's simply that the poem embodies a change in the bearing of the person. I think nearly that a lot — virtually the importance of knowing both that I can change my listen and that my mind tin can change. This April, in one case again, it feels proficient to be reminded.
Source: https://www.ask.com/culture/national-poetry-month-let-poetry-change-your-mind?utm_content=params%3Ao%3D740004%26ad%3DdirN%26qo%3DserpIndex
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