Poetry is like a river for there is a saying that you never step into the same river twice because the waters always moving, it’s in constant change, though, the river will still have the same name even though, as I said earlier, it’s different.
Poetry is an overarching term, it covers so many styles of writing and there are so many different interpretations of what poetry is. I’ve heard it be called defiant, a lonely, radical, precious expression of a single life. I’ve heard it be called an ambush, an insurrection, resurrection, insubordination against amnesia. It can be brought forth from anything and everything from racism to the time I walked my dog. Poetry can touch the coldest of hearts but it brew rage and hatred in the softest of them.
Poetry is like a river because some people hate swimming in it but others love it, some are in the middle and only like certain parts. I do not enjoy poetry, I do not see between the lines and sometimes I wish I could. I wish I could see the beauty others can see with such ease. But I can’t, I am the one who hates swimming in this river I call poetry, in this river that’s constantly changing.
I’ve seen poems as short as a line, poems 160 pages long. I’ve seen poems with rhymes in every lines and poems and poems without. Poems with metaphors and similes and poems that seem to tell it straight. I’ve seen poems written in multiple languages and those only in one. There are poems written with repetition and poems that hardly even repeat a word. Poems cannot be defined by a single rule set, poems are not singular, they are not all the same, far from it actually.
I’ve found that it’s the sound of the writing that tells you if its a poem or not. I could read a book to you and then I could read a poem and you could the difference. Poems are best when read aloud, when you can hear them and come up with the pattern its spoken, even if the poem does not seem to have any form of patterns.
I write poetry because I have to, I write a poem when I need to. It’s for a grade, I do what I can to pass. I tend not to like my poems all that much, because of that. I have found myself with a problem, I say I hate poetry, but the speeches I come up with sometimes, they sound like poems. I don’t mean them to be, I hardly want them to be, but when I say them they sound like it to me. There could be zero rhymes, repetition, metaphors or similes, but they sound like a poem.
Over this semester, I have worked on projects that I’ve hated. Poems I am not proud of, the 12 on 12 on 12 poem, the 20 little poetry prompts, the love poem, and many more. But there are a few that I was too stubborn to admit I kind of liked, such as Missing, Letter to Paranoia, Daily Life in a Starbucks, and Not the Bullet.
Poetry is like a river, a river I claimed to hate swimming in. But I suppose I lied just a bit, for sometimes, I do enjoy poetry. Sometimes, its ok. For the river is always changing and no single poem is the same.
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