I am a pre-med biochemistry major with a sneaking love for writing and reading (hence my involvement in HerCampus!). I was the elementary school kid that would get in trouble for reading under the covers on a school night. When I was deciding on my class schedule for Spring Quarter, I knew I needed to take an English class to fulfill my GE requirement. Scrolling through the limited options: Creative Writing, 20th Century British Literature, Modern Literary, and Critical Theory, I was already yawning. Honestly, when my eyes glazed over a poetry class, my first thought was that I would have to do minimal work for the class and so it would be a good course for my already rigorous schedule.
Now, I am heading into week 6 of the course, and I’m learning so much about myself through poetry and the words that seem to fall onto the paper when given creative freedom. Poetry is unique in that it brings a whole new connection to the language. Suddenly all words are unfamiliar and connections between concepts are so far-fetched that analyzing a poem takes effort and deep thought. It wasn’t until I began composing poems that I began to unlock memories of earlier encounters with poetry.
One of my favorite books when I was a child was a poetry book. I can’t recall if I was gifted this book or if I found it in a store and begged for it or if it appeared within the cracks of my childhood home like some sort of omen from the poetry gods. The book was “Where the Sidewalk Ends” by Shel Silverstein. He is more commonly known for his children’s book “The Giving Tree,” which is a cute story with a meaningful lesson that I probably wasn’t grasping at the age of 5. Similarly, his poetry books have a tone that is mostly whimsical, yet they still include some thoughtful themes that I can even resonate with today. One that stuck out to me is titled, “Don’t Tell Me.”
It goes:
“Please don’t tell me I should hug,
Don’t tell me I should care.
Don’t tell me just how grand I’d feel
If I just learned to share.
Don’t say, ‘It’s all right to cry,’
‘Be kind,’ ‘Be fair’, ‘Be true.’
Just let me see YOU do it,
Then I might just do it too.”
The voice of this poem sounds a little juvenile and childlike, but the content of it feels more mature. In adult life, it’s really easy to dish out advice that you don’t follow yourself. It’s even more frustrating to be told arbitrary clichés when coping with complicated problems. I think that often children are told these phrases, but dealing with emotions and hard situations, even at a young age, requires practice and effort. Some adults never even learn how to cope in a healthy way and instead rely on tacky phrases to sweep their issues under the rug.
In high school, I loved reading Rupi Kaur. At first, I was intrigued by the aesthetic of the book, but after reading the poems, while going through some of my own personal and internal struggles at the time, I felt extremely connected to her words and experiences. One specific poem that shook me to my core was:
“as a father of three daughters
it would have been normal
for him to push marriage on us
this has been the narrative for
the women in my culture for hundreds of years
instead he pushed education
knowing it would set us free
in a world that wanted to contain us
he made sure that we learned
to walk independently”
“…in a world that wanted to contain us
he made sure that we learned
to walk independently”
“to fathers with daughters,” Rupi Kaur, 2014.
My dad is also an immigrant and a father of three daughters. He raised us with tough love and high expectations. He pushed me to further my education as Rupi felt her father had done.
The duality of words and ambiguous undertones is what I truly appreciate about poetry. It evokes a different thought-process than reading prose and forces you to expand your normal train of thought. Poetry takes the reader through the writer’s mind, whilst inviting the reader to make their own associations and assumptions about the piece. And while I’ll always choose a book over poetry to read for hours on end, poetry is an art form that I now look forward to composing as a creative outlet.