What Writing Poetry Frequently Can Give Us?
Poetry is rooted in the body. It is everyone’s first language before she or he begins to learn the tongue of family and culture. It is our shared birthright.
Poetry is rooted in our encounters with the world that live as sensation, feeling and thoughts inside the body – this is what is called imagery. When you stop regularly and listen for these sensations, you learn to hear your body speak in a quiet, deep voice which knows more than just what your mind knows. The process of writing poetry connects us to our deepest inner voices as well as to our observations about the external world. We know who we are in the midst of our fast-paced world, at least for some moments, when we write and read poetry.
1)Writing poetry helps us to remember and value moments.
2)Writing poetry creates a bridge between the individual and the inner voice of experience, memory and imagination. It provides a way for the authentic self to speak and emerge, to become influential and balance that part of the self which is primarily a social construct.
3)Writing poetry helps to keep the imagination alive. It makes us less dependent upon external stimuli such as television, movies, and video games.
4)Working with imagery, one of the essential building blocks of poetry, cultivates awareness of our physical surroundings as well as insight into the abstract realities that exist beyond the concrete, natural world. It enlarges our capacity for metaphorical thinking.
5)We learn to cherish written and spoken truth. We learn to see through advertising slogans, political manipulations, and “ordinary” lies.
6)Poetry provides a canvas (the page) that utilizes white space (pauses and breaths) as a compositional unit. White space becomes a kind of frame that provides visual emphasis upon words and phrases. As a result, the writer pays closer visual attention to the weight of individual words and phrases. It is easier to learn how to say more with fewer words when you are paying closer visual attention to language.
7)Poems teach depth of attention which is an important form of elaboration.
White space allows the writer to see more deeply and critically into content. Line breaks and stanza breaks facilitate making realizations about the significance of details, their meaning.
8)Poet Marvin Bell once said, “A poem should listen to itself as it moves along.” By paying attention to how one line leads to the next line and the next line throughout the movement of a poem, a writer learns quickly about how best to sequence details, ideas, feelings and actions. Developing a sense of line also leads to developing a sense of how to organize the lines into stanzas, which has a general correspondence to paragraphs.
9)Along with sequencing comes pacing. As a writer sees and hears how best to sequence, the writer also develops a feel not just for the order and number of details but also for timing. For example, how quickly should the poem move from one detail to another in order to create an emotional effect? Should pauses be built into the narration as a way of stretching out the use of time?
10)By reading the poem aloud as early drafts and revisions take place, writers develop their ear for words as musical notes and as rhythms. This adds beauty and emotional energy to the language used, the moment revealed, the story told.
11)Writing poetry becomes a valuable process of exploration. Poet Pattiann Rogers said that poems are often triggered by questions that a poet is asking. The writing of the poem becomes a kind of response to the question. This process of questioning and response fosters imaginative as well as critical thinking.
12)Reading poems aloud to one another builds a stronger, more intimate community as we share our lives, insights, and vulnerabilities with each other, learning that we are not alone. We experience connection.
13)Writing poetry enlarges our capacity for confronting and living with paradox. It helps us to find meaning as we examine the tension of opposites. Perhaps we become more accepting of the terrible beauty
of our world.
Cyra S. Dumitru
January 2005