We are exposed to poetry from the moment we are born. Lullabys and nursery rhymes are poetry of some sort. We are initially led to believe that poetry rhymes in iambic pentameter. We digest Dr Seuss books in his unique poetic phrasing.
I had to memorize Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening in fourth grade. I can still recite every line. Although I also had memorize Frost’s My Heart’s In The Highlands, only the second verse has stuck with me. In fifth grad, we we introduced to haiku: 3 lines total with 5, then 7, then 5 syllables for each line. My 10-year old self was prolific with that genre of poetry. I remember writing mostly about my pet rats.
In high school, I began writing volumes of poetry when I didn’t sleep at night. Prose, iambic pentameter, some haiku, I still have manilla envelopes filled with this teenage angst. I wrote a little poetry in college but don’t recall writing through adulthood.
Why did I stop writing poetry? What inspires this art form?
I asked Daughter if she had ever written a poem. Before she could answer, I told her I was not going to ask her about the content of the poem, just if she ever had written one. When she answered in the affirmative, I asked her if it was something outside of the classroom, not assigned. Again, the answer was affirmative. So I asked why she thought people wrote poetry (I didn’t ask why SHE wrote a poem because I didn’t want her to shut down) and she answered:
because they feel flowery.”
That made me smile and gave me glee. Yes, when one feels flowery, written expression is a wonderful way to communicate that feeling.
