Personal Poetry: Writing Your Lyrical Life
“I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.”
~ Marianne Moore, “Poetry”
As Marianne Moore describes in “Poetry,” many have complicated feelings about poetry. This genre may have made you hate high school English as you struggled through Shakespearean sonnets or pondered difficult language in formal poems from centuries past. For many, poetry’s attention to moments of quiet stillness makes it feel like a dead genre with little relevance to the fast-paced world in which we live.
Yet, poetry is one of the oldest forms of human expression, with the epic poetry of Homer, for example, preserving dramatic historical events and cultural values. Today’s mode of lyric poetry reflects human voices each speaking from distinct moments in time. As such, lyric poems grant access to human experience beyond the facts we can learn from history. What does it feel like to move through human existence? Poets throughout time have preserved their experiences for us.
Poetry has always been a modality through which writers could explore the most complicated parts of being human: love, death, grief, mortality, aging, family relationships, human suffering, spiritual yearning, joy and celebration, as well as other intense emotional and psychological states. Shakespeare’s challenging sonnets, which often explored unrequited love and youthful rebellion, could be compared to some of the personal content on social media today. These are some of the “genuine” experiences Moore references above.
Why Read Poems?
We read poetry in order to learn more about the human experience, and to see our own existential questions mirrored back, often with answers approximating wisdom. Through this process, we find camaraderie and human connection, even across time and geography.
As Walt Whitman wrote in the poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” some 160 years ago,
“It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.”
In Dead Poet's Society, Robin Williams as Mr. Keating, a rebellious English teacher at an elite all-boys prep school, makes the following case to his students for why they should read and write poetry. Mr. Keating sums up the human need for poetry:
"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion. In medicine, law, business, engineering—these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love. These are what we stay alive for."
Why Write Poems?
Everyone has an impulse to make meaning from their experiences, and every one of us has, at some point, been kept up at night by a questioning, circling mind. Poetry provides an outlet to ponder the range of human existence and to explore the deeper meaning in our lives. But if reading poems in high school seemed daunting, how do you begin to write them?
In this introductory class, I will help demystify poetry by exposing you to contemporary (and long-dead!) poets that you will actually want to read. You’ll learn the essential elements of poetic craft—things like figurative language, precise imagery, structure, meter, and rhyme—through the study of great poems. You will read poems that make you feel and understand human experience in new ways, even as they articulate things that may be quite familiar to your own life.
By the end of this course, you will feel confident in your ability to read and comprehend poetry, as well as your ability to write in the genre. You will generate six original pieces that you can revise using extensive feedback, thus ensuring that you have a portfolio of publishable pieces by the course’s end.