Blog No. 2: To Poet or To Poetry?

To poet or poetry, to art or artist? I have always had a great love for poetry. As a person that was introduced to poetry at a very early age, I have found a great respect and love for the craft. While it is very easy to marvel at Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Byron’s love poems, it is a very different thing entirely to craft poetry. Welcome to Tuesday’s with Melanie! This week let’s take the time to reflect on the poetry process and how much difference can be found in creation and marveling at the craft.

The process of crafting poetry is deeply personal and something that should not be taken lightly. It’s truly a reflection of how you view the world around you and how you find meaning in love, sadness, and emotions you really can’t put a label to. I found it very easy to critique the work of other poets. Perhaps I should have not taken that job ever so lightly. The idea of critiquing somebody else’s emotions is easy for us, but incredibly vulnerable to the poet themselves. After crafting my own poetry, I found it incredibly nerve racking to perform and allow others to critique how I felt about an event in my own life. It draws my mind back to theorist Roland Barthes’ sentiments in his piece, Death of the Author. Barthes laments on the idea that a piece of work is no longer the artists’ the minute the work they produced is published. A statement of this nature holds much truth when considering how widely poetry is interpreted and analyzed to hold personal meaning to all.

Crafting my own poetry was widely different from my analysis of Elizabeth’s Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee?” I must admit my poetry was perhaps not as personal as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love sonnets to her husband, it was nevertheless a deeply vulnerable experience. Writing about poetry informs the writer about how you truly feel about certain life events, and how one handles their own emotions. It’s a very brave and personal thing to craft your own poetry. It helps you hone in on your own craft as a writer. It allows you to dismiss psychic distance, as there’s no room to be overly argumentative or neutral about a subject.

What a tool poetry can be to future teachers! Future teachers and perhaps lecturers in the future are allowed to become passionate about something that they truly find important. Every poet has a different love for a certain emotion or art form. Philip Larkin thrived on personal familial poetry, while William Blake was fond of the natural world. It’s crucial to find what truly makes you passionate as a writer and this is incredibly helpful to learning more about yourself. It will help you find what perhaps what you wish to teach and what kind of emotions, actions, and relationships you find incredibly important. The act of poetry itself probably is exceptionally well to practice within the classroom and within your own personal life as it teaches one empathy and vulnerability. Two things the world might just need a little bit more of.