Poetry

Poetry has actually been a quite enjoyable unit. I have never really enjoyed poetry. I never saw the beauty in the juxtaposition of the words or the images created in short lines. However, these poetry responses and the poems that we have had to read nightly have changed my opinion. For example, last night I wrote my response to “You Are There” by Nikki Giovanni. This poem seemed to have no meaning at first, but after rereading it several times, I noticed small oddities: the letter “i” wasn’t capitalized, there were some lines that were only one word long, the first letter in every line was not capitalized. These small oddities gave way to a greater meaning. I realized that the lowercase “i”s were probably meant to deemphasize solitude and instead emphasize togetherness and unity. I had never looked at poems so closely before. I read the words and did not think as to why the author made these small changes in the structure of the poem. Now, I realize that there is a purpose behind everything the poet writes.

Another such example is the poem “Wheelbarrow”.

In that poem, each stanza is shaped

like a wheelbarrow.

Cool, right? Poetry is challenging because the poets try to communicate a very deep theme in few words. They use word play and other tactics in order to get this theme across. Poetry is beautiful and I am glad that I can finally appreciate this fact.