Celebrating National Poetry Month

04.13.2021

I have always loved words - especially words that made me feel something. I love tragedy, love stories, long, flowing sentences that cascade across clean pages like songs riding on the wind.
        We have a name for these strings of words, and that name is “poetry.” It’s been around since the beginning of creation, really. Remember that Adam spoke bars when he first met his soulmate: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of ‘man.’”
        And there were many poets after Adam - from King David and King Solomon, to Dante and Shakespeare, to more recent poets like Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and the wonderfully talented Amanda Gorman.
        Over the years, poetry has been a means of expressing humanity’s deepest desires for love, joy, and connection. It has been a means of sharing opinions and viewpoints. And, within the last century, it has become an important platform for addressing important social and cultural issues.
        I find poetry convincing in the honest beauty it presents. It is at once simple and intricate, straightforward and thought-provoking. It’s sometimes flowery, sometimes raw, at times joyful, at times sad - but always beautiful. It has the ability to give you the chills, and there’s always something for every individual.
        April is National Poetry Month. Launched by the Academy of American Poets in April of 1996, National Poetry Month “reminds the public that poets have an integral role to play in our culture and that poetry matters. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K-12 teachers, librarians, booksellers...and, of course, poets, marking poetry’s important place in our lives.” This April marks the 25th annual celebration of poets and poetry, and as such, it seems appropriate to highlight just a few of the many talented student poets on the Andrews University campus. They answer a few questions about why they believe poetry is important and why they personally choose to use this creative form as a means of expression.

Why do you believe that poetry is still important today? Do you believe that poetry holds power?

        An active member of the Scriptorium, the creative writing club on the Andrews campus, Karenna Lee (freshman, English, business administration) responded: “Poetry holds power because it invites you into someone else’s experience in a very small amount of space. It’s the human element of historical events and current issues, because as it brings awareness, it carries with it the author’s emotions. Like most forms of art, it creates the impact the facts need to inspire empathy and change.”
        Marcel Mattox (sophomore, graphic design), who also enjoys writing and sharing poetry, says this: “Poetry is a way of expressing emotions. Painting them, in a way. You can see and feel them in such a raw way. Poetry can be rhythmic, like a song flowing and harmonizing from stanza to stanza. I find poetry important because it’s a way of expressing how I and how others throughout history have experienced this human adventure we call life.”
        Andrew Pak (freshman, music) a musician as well as a writer, goes in depth: “Poetry is unique to me in that it’s the manipulation of language, the very tool we use to think. In that sense, our thoughts can only be as complex as our vocabulary. Additionally, as the Observer Effect in physics describes, the act of observing can change reality - in the same vein, observing and describing reality through language changes reality. Subjective perceptions of reality are often more relevant to the reality of our actions than objective reality. If we can change our perceptions of reality by using different language to describe it, then we can effectively change reality through mere words.” He adds, “I think poetry makes something new out of the old, and through this transformation of ideas, poetry can make a real change in the way people think. By reimagining the way people think about reality, poetry can make us more conscious and aware of certain things we usually already have an idea of, whether these be stereotypes, simply generalizations/presumptions, or mundane things we don’t usually give attention to. Otherwise, it can be a form of self-expression that links humans in fellowship of a universal or specific feeling. It’s always comforting to know, ‘Hey, someone else out there in the world knows this feeling too.’”

What forms of poetry do you enjoy writing and why? What got you started on writing poetry?

        Karenna says, “I haven’t pinned down what kind of poetry I like to write yet. Generally speaking, I haven’t explored much in terms of rhyme or structure. I have so much respect for people who can correctly use things like the heroic couplet, but right now, I work in free form. It’s mostly because I never planned to write poetry. So far, it’s served as a simple way to get thoughts on paper, but I’m very open to learning more!”
        When asked what got him started on writing poetry, Marcel explains, “I started writing poetry [as] another way of expressing myself. In a catchy way, too - the way others could show their emotions and tell stories through poetry. I think I wanted to experience that [as well].”
        Andrew describes his experience like this: “I started writing poetry in the spring of 2020, during my senior year of high school right before the pandemic shutdown. I was inspired by this writer I found on the internet named Savannah Brown, whose poetry really resonated with me [because of] its accessibility and modern style. I decided that I could start writing some of my own poems as modes of self-expression and an outlet for my bottled up feelings. I think that poetry for me personally is just a method of pouring out my thoughts and emotions in an eloquent and relatively structured way. Writing things down also helps me process ideas, because there’s only so much I can hold in my brain.”

        This April, I encourage you to explore poetry in all of its forms. Discover newer poets, older poets. Explore modern poetry and classic poetry. Try writing some poetry yourself, if you haven’t already!
        I guarantee that you will find something to fall in love with.