The power of poetry

credit: timmalone45 | license

Ten years ago, I'd have never expected to be blogging this.  I didn't like poetry.  In fact, I cordially disliked it and never went out of my way to read it.  Today, however, I'm not just an eager poetry reader, but an avid poetry writer.  Who'd have thought.

The only poem from my childhood that I somewhat liked is the famous "The Road Not Taken."  The imagery and the flowing, 'musical' stanzas intrigued me.  I couldn't find a message in it, but even my childish self thought it was a sad poem and that there was something behind it.


Still, it was years later that I began to love poetry; and even then, it took a 1000-page book to make me understand the power of poetry.  The Lord of the Rings is well-known for its songs, poems, and mottos in verse.  Poems about life, death, humor, and irony--my blog's name comes from one of them. The poetry has purpose in the story: the characters turn to poetry when soliloquies and speeches fail.  By the end of the book, it made me realize something I'd thought impossible: that, sometimes, prose is inadequate.

Or is it even replaceable?  This spring I read Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which I've raved about more than once and am currently re-reading.  Onegin is written in chapters of poetic stanzas, whose particular scheme is called the 'Onegin stanza.'  Nevertheless, this doesn't detract from the story--quite the opposite.  Pushkin's ability to propel the story through verse is remarkable: flexible pacing and emotional range bring as much story into this novella as you might find in a much longer book.

Writing it in poetry made that possible.

As I mentioned above, I write poetry, too.  At first, it was just for school, but within the last year or two, I've been writing poems because I actually want to--or perhaps I should say need to.

I wrote my first 'real' poem a year or two (or three) ago.  For this post, it doesn't signify what the topic was; but suffice it to say that it had been banging on the walls of my mind for months. It disturbed and fascinated me.  So, I sat down and wrote a poem, "The Masquerade"...non-rhythmical and somewhat short.  The meaning is buried behind the words, the topic itself makes no visible appearance; but in that tangle of broken lines, I had driven the figurative dragon away. I suddenly felt I could move on.

I've written about 30-something pages of poetry now, in the same way.  The first words often spring into my mind like fireworks; the other words and the rhyming scheme, whatever it may be, often just come naturally.  This not to say I'm a good poet, not at all.  Rather, the force of combined perspective, emotion, and poetry's flexible form all act as a catalyst to the writing process. It's not even a process--it's a thunderstorm of words, which you drive into the paper until you're worn-out.  You don't have to worry about paragraphs, fragments, and punctuation.  There aren't any rules to choke inspiration, and the pacing is whatever you want it to be.  There's no need for characters, because you're all of them, if you want to be.

You don't even have to hide your emotion; you can bring it to the forefront and cloak it in cryptic words.  Happiness is then tempered by the satisfaction of having adequately expressed it, and sadness is diluted with the presence of words.  The problem doesn't go away, but each poem is like a piece you've chipped off of it--a real set of words that can be put onto a page, folded up, and put away.