By judging the topic, I guess most of you will know the topic of today’s entry: Poetry. Personally, I think poetry is the most beautiful text-type. It’s like painting a picture with words. As a big fan of literature, poetry is my favourite among all the text-types.
So if you’ve been following my blog, you’ll notice that I do write poems once in a while. Of course, I can’t guarantee that they’re as good as the ones from the one and the only one Ellen Hopkins. (FYI, she’s the writer of a famous poem “Haven”.) But one thing I’m very sure about is that it’s poems that can help us express our feelings and thoughts. You might say I can also express my feelings and thoughts through music and songs, and even drawings. Well partly, you’re right. But poetry is a different story. Take drawings as an example. You use different colours to express your emotions. If you’re happy and jolly, you’ll draw something pleasant and use bright colours. But you can’t really fully and exactly tell what you’re feeling and thinking in your brain. Through words and sentences, you’re telling the world how you feel OUT LOUD! You can even use different techniques to make it more appealing and vivid. It’s like a piece of splendid art work but in words.
Up to this point, poetry, kind of sounds like a really complicated thing. To some of us, it is. That’s why it’s less popular among students. What a tragedy. Some of the poems are quite difficult to understand. You may not be able to see through the words and get what the poet is trying to say. It’s probably because you’ve never experienced or gone through the poet’s situation. You feel completely clueless to the poem. Just like a positive thinking and happy person can hardly understand the poem of a depressed, suicidal writer.
Another reason could be that most of the poems you read are very old. The use of wordings and the settings are completely different from the modern ones. It’s just like the old people trying to understand us teens’ kind of language like LOL, ROFL. Or the other way round. These all stop students from trying to explore more about poetry, not to mention trying to arouse their interest in writing their own poem.
The school could play an important role in helping students overcome their fear of poems; moreover, promoting poetry. The first thing is: start the subject of English Literature. In this subject, students would encounter numerous poems. They would learn how to read poems and decode the meaning hidden underneath. Once they know how to understand poems, they’ll be interested in poetry. You would be impressed by how the powerful poetic devices, like the manipulation of the rhyme and meter and the use of metaphorical language, can reveal vividly to you the life and the thoughts of the poets and their world. For those of you who couldn’t study literature or poetry because the school doesn’t offer this class. I FEEL YOU! You and I both know how it feels not having a group of friends with the same love for poetry.
For something less academic, the school can organize poetry reading competitions. Let students experience more about poetry through reading them and performing them. Displaying poems in the campus could be a good idea too. But the choice of poems is very important. The modern poems are more preferable than the ones from the ancient past. Give students more opportunities to be exposed to poetry. It surely helps them improve their language and become more artistic.
That’s pretty much what I want to say about poetry. Thanks for bearing with my ranting. Apologies for my followers who aren’t a fan of poetry. But I hope my introduction can arouse your interest in exploring a bit more about this beautiful way of expression through language. Feel free to leave a comment and let more know what you think about poetry. Laters!