I remember being in middle school and thinking that poetry was pretty dumb. Sure, I enjoyed my fair share of humorous poems here and there, but poetry as I saw it was a bunch of stuffy, lovey-dovey nonsense. None of it made sense to me. It seemed like the purpose was to be as confusing as possible.
The first poem I ever actually enjoyed was Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’. I remember thinking about how this poem combined both literal and figurative elements to make sense. I enjoyed the imagery and even memorized the first paragraph. I still wasn’t a fan, mind you, but this was the first time I got something out of poetry.
In high school, I read a variety of poems in my English classes. One that I remember being intrigued by was ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carol. This poem is seemingly nonsense but in a different sense of the word. I recognized several of the silly descriptions, like the Vorpal Sword and the Jabberwocky itself from modern fantasy media. This poem was interesting to me because of how it made things up, but those things were able to become more mainstream. Carol invented words and sounds in this one poem.
Still, poetry was not something I was overly interested in. That was until my senior year of high school, when, in my English 105 class, we had a unit on poetry. We read poems like ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ by William Carlos Williams, and ‘Musee De Beaus Arts’ by W. H. Auden. These poems were ones that I absolutely adored. Maybe it was because of the fact that they were about the Icarus myth. Maybe it was because of Peiter Breughel’s painting that both poems were based on. Maybe it was because I was coming to understand the power of poetry. But I was intrigued. I went on to read more poems in this unit, finding some that confused me, interested me, and made me actually enjoy reading, writing, and analyzing poems. It was in this class that I found my favorite poem, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow,’ by William Carlos Williams.
This poem really cemented my love for poetry. It is short, simple, but vivid. The crisp imagery from this poem inspires me to this day, as imagery is something I struggle with. To this day, I share this poem whenever I can and enjoy reciting it to spread it’s simple beauty.
Fast forward now a bit to high school. I took a creative writing class, wherein we read Taneum Bambrick’s poetry collection Vantage. For anyone who is remotely interested in poetry, I wholly recommend this book. It is a side to poetry that I feel is not often seen, as the poems are gross, dirty, and don’t shy away from uncomfortable topics. This was so different from the overly cheesy poems that I had associated the genre with for so long. In addition to reading this collection, I also was able to write poems of my own, and was able to consider how my mental health and life’s experiences played into this.
I came to see that poetry was not about being confusing or overly descriptive, but rather it was a way to use words and imagery to things that are hard to put to words. It’s a way to convey complex ideas that are not so simply stated. I was able to use poetry to express my own experiences in a way that allowed me to understand them better.
Poetry became a form of personal expression and coping. I was able to write on my experiences as a child of divorce, my complicated relationships with my parents, my religious upbringing, and coming to terms with my identity. It was a powerful tool for voicing my internal emotions and processing how I felt. It became my go-to coping mechanism for those sleepless nights and hard days.
Since then, I’ve taken my fair share of poetry and creative writing classes, and have even changed my minor and career goals. I switched from Spanish to Creative Writing, and although I still want to be a high school teacher, I now aim to get my Masters in creative writing and move on to teaching college after a few years. I wouldn’t go as far as to call myself a writer yet, but I have ideas and aspirations for poetry collections and novels that I want to write and hopefully publish. I’ve got quite a ways to go, but I’ve got a lot of time to keep writing and perfecting what I’m working on.
I’ve come a long way over the last ten years when it comes to poetry. I’m still figuring out my goals and style, but I’m excited to keep going and have high hopes for my future. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing and revising and writing some more, building a collection and coming to love poetry even more.