Poetry intimidates me.
When I read it, I feel like the poet is pulling a fast one on me. When I write it, I feel like a fraud for trying. To perform my own poetry, then? Well, I was not excited to do it, that's for sure.
However, I love the part of any kind of the creative writing process where I'm given parameters. In other words, I like that for each poem we wrote, we had to follow certain rules (the first one, for example: Describe a recent experience/encounter/event that shaped your life or the way you view the world around you). And then I love when there's a group of us all doing the same thing and we are all, then, tasked with sharing our results to compare with one another.
Upon any type of exercise like this, I usually like to make lists. As I did that, the list poem came to mind. And so, that's what I did.
Now, writing about poetry made me focus on not just understanding words, but also understanding patterns and how those patterns or repetitions might carry meaning themselves. The poem I wrote about utilized the poetic device anaphora, which is a literary device that uses repetition of short phrases or single words at the beginning of clauses or sentences to enhance rhythm and evoke audience emotional participation in the literary work. In looking closer at my poem and how anaphora was used, I began to see how much it contributed to the meaning of the poem. As such, I kind of did the same thing in my own poem to create meaning.
Part of what I learned in doing this assignment is that there is a unique power of poetry, which is hidden in mystery (the parts not indicated or consciously vague) or in figurative language. I also saw how it really engaged students in our class. I was so surprised how people got so personal, how people got so much into reading it aloud, and how, as audience members, they were so supportive. That experience went hand-in-hand with what I took away from the Edutopia YouTube video we watched on performance poetry engaging high school students. Going into this part of the class, I would've said I had no interest in teaching poetry. However, based on the engagement and excitement it created in our class, I'd reconsider.
