Mr. Z Presents - What's the Point of Poetry?

As a young child I enjoyed hearing poetry. I liked the rhythm and the rhyme and often the silly or funny topics that poets wrote for children. But once I got older, and the poetry got more serious, I struggled to enjoy it. At that point, the only thing I really liked about poetry was that it was short. Fortunately my feelings about poetry have received an injection of fun over the past few years as I’ve learned to look at it differently. This year, during the poetry unit, I learned a lot from some very special teachers, and as a result, my love for the genre continues to grow.

Michael Salinger and Sara Holbrook, the visiting poets who taught some of our poetry classes during the unit, showed me a lot about the process of writing poetry. One of the most important tips centered around revision. They taught me to create “versions” of the poem I was working on. The title of my first draft is called “Version 1”. I make a copy of the completed Version 1 and then begin tearing it apart for a “Version 2”. At this point I’m cutting out unnecessary words, finding the right sensory detail to make my ideas objective and not subjective. Later I might create a Version 3 and focus on elements of poetry like alliteration or rhyming. If you look at my poem “Cool”, you’ll see the final result of this process. That poem looked very different in its original form!

One thing that I now really love about poetry is the way it can capture a moment. I had a lot of fun using a photo of my kids playing with some dogs when we were on vacation in Australia. Writing from an image like this helped me to remember and include sensory details that I felt in that moment. Then I went one step further and wrote the poem “Orchard” using a string of prepositional phrases. I found that this process really helped me to put the moment into words.

Finally, a poetic element I’ve been trying to utilize within my poems is alliteration. I am aware of the sounds of words, and I enjoy combining words that share the same beginning sound. Often I feel this technique enhances my poems. You can see this at work in the poem “The Beauty of Simplicity” in lines like “humming in the hallways” or “cluttered chaos”. I’m making conscious choices now as a poet with my words, and I like the result.

Moving forward with my writing, I think that poetry will be a genre that I’ll write more frequently. I also see ways to use poetry when I’m writing in a different genre to help me work on building an image or to play with the sound of words. I’m glad to say that this year’s study continues to build on my love for poetry.