By Rebecca Harrelson, Staff Writer

Published in print Feb. 11, 2015

I started loving to write as soon as I fell in love. I started loving to write once I came to college, and had this vast world of intellect and knowledge thrust upon me.  I spoke with my Intermediate Poetry Workshop Professor Shawn Delgado about poetry being a form of expression, hearing his thoughts on poetry made me fall more in love with this art form. 

When individuals hear “poetry” they may automatically think Shakespeare or jump to a terrible English class that forced you to deconstruct a riddled poem. Not many thoroughly have a love for this particular art form, and I wonder why. Delgado remarked in our conversation “poetry carries a lot of baggage in contemporary America.  It’s seen as obtuse, unyielding, intentionally difficult and overly decorous. It’s seen as ineffectual and unnecessary, triviality when there is serious work to do.” Amongst many thinking poetry is trivial, I like to think many just haven’t been able to relate to the vast forms of poetry floating about in the world. Delgado and I share the thought that poetry can be irrevocably valuable to our lives, and uncovering our thoughts and emotions about everyday habits and experiences.

“When novelist and short story author Kurt Vonnegut would speak in public, he would often suggest that everyone in attendance write a short poem from time to time. Even if the author could only manage 6 lines, he or she would have created something entirely new, from scratch, without having to purchase any expensive supplies or take classes to learn the proper strokes. There is an inherent sense of accomplishment in that creative act and the most minimal requirements. Do you speak? Yes? The you, too, could write a poem.”

Having such an art form simplified to merely sitting down and letting thoughts flow out of your brain and onto your page brings about such a feeling of freedom and exhaustion. When I am writing a piece or concentrated on one particular word that would only fit in this one section at the end of my process I feel drained of all the emotion and blood in my body. I have always been a firm supporter of the quote by Ernest Hemingway “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

That feeling of accomplishment and exhaustion is one of the best feelings I as an artist could ask for. You are making someone or something more profound, you stop to consider its inherent meaning, gestures, and works spoken by others, trying to pinpoint why those certain object elicited that particular emotional response in the most cathartic way.

“In the reading of a good poem, we can recognize some small part of ourselves and it shed light on the human business behind our interactions, our motivations, our fears. In that recognition, the world is a smaller, less lonely place. If it wasn’t for William Shakespeare, we wouldn’t even have the word “loneliness,” although the human condition or feeling would still be.”

The goal for this article is to hopefully spark a useful therapeutic bone in your body to seek out the new modern styles, to be able to relate to words on a page, to become more in tuned with your emotions and thoughts about everyday activities.

Poetry needs to be used, it needs to be present, and conversations about writings need to happen in this day and age of technology and images flashing before us far more than words.

There is poetry out there that can give you goose bumps, can strike you so hard you cry, you laugh, you get turned on, you reminisce about your past loves, your family, yourself, the ability behind words is never merely old fashioned and outdated it is how we all express  our lives- simply to connect to other human beings.

Delgado explains, “If poetry is going to continue to grow (and I have faith in this), poets need to get better about promoting poetry, being literary citizens. This isn’t just about promotion our work or trying to get published in journals that nobody reads, it means going to readings, sharing other people’s poems and books.

America is ready for poetry, and poetry is diverse enough for America. We may just not know it yet.”