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Poetry is useful, and beautiful, and far bigger than the small, ill-defined boxes we so often try to place it in.
Jay at TED Talks.
takes in more, touches every style, every genre, every topic, every life – and, like smoke, if you try to trap it, to define it, to box it in, some of it will always be missed, or leak out. Those bits are often the most exciting parts. All of this to say, poetry is ancient, and vast, and always bigger than we think. Poetry also has a serious image problem. The most common feedback I get on my work is “You made me realise I could like poetry!” The truth is, I’m not doing anything special, the people who say this to me like poetry because, on some level, everyone likes poetry – they just don’t realise it. The biggest proof of that I can give is what happens when a baby is born. We sing them lullabies – poetry. We read them books of rhyming stories and parables – poetry. We play word games full of rhymes and rhythm – poetry. Our first instinct, as humans, is to welcome our children into the world with poetry – and they love it. Poetry is our first introduction to language, and to literature, and so everyone loves poetry – or they do until it begins to be called “poetry”. Everyone loves poetry until it is packaged up into those fundamentally insufficient boxes, and handed out as something academic, to be studied, not felt.
There is nothing more likely to make a young person hate poetry for life than giving them a poem written 200 years before they were born, and asking them to pull it apart, to treat it like a puzzle, or an engineering problem, where everything has a big complicated name, and everything has to be explainable. Poetry is not explainable, or definable. Poets specialise in putting words together in ways that shouldn’t really make sense, and in doing so, they convey the essence of things. Isn’t that what we’re all searching for, especially teenagers? The essence of things? To see ourselves and our lives reflected back? To see articulated that which we cannot express?
Once you understand this, what seems to be the biggest paradox in poetry education becomes very clear. What is this paradox? That it’s always “the naughty kids” who write the best poems.
A distillation of feelings
It happens every time I visit a school, the lower sets, the “naughty boys”, the “troubled kids”, the ones who struggle, they always write incredible poetry. Why? Because they have so much they desperately want to say, and if presented with an emphasis on the lack of rules, poetry finally gives them the space to say it. Poetry is the distillation of feeling, and the sharing of truth. Like most art forms, it allows us to hold a mirror up to our experiences, and show them to others. To write a
Autumn-Winter 2020 PEN&INC. 11
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