April
is National Poetry Month. I have to confess that I’ve never been a fan of
poetry, though I applaud those who write it and others who try to interpret it.
Poetry just seems like a written expression of one’s dreams, nightmares, and
hazy memories that are mixed with unachievable desires. It is a blurry world,
one that is not rooted anywhere. It is not concrete or universal. I need a
decoder, translator, or psychiatrist to figure out what the author is trying to
say.
Still,
I am not here to bury poetry, but merely to recognize the brilliance provided
by this enigma.
So
how does one find an appreciation of poetry?
First,
you must come to know about the great poets, like Chaucer, Dickinson or
Angelou—or Keats, Byron, Auden, Eliot and Shakespeare. To get an introduction
on how to decipher poems or gain a greater appreciation for the long-practiced
art, check out Poetry 101: A Crash Course in Poetry by Susan Dalzell
(Adams Media).
“Poetry
is among the most complex art forms evolved by the human race,” says the book’s
introduction. “It uses words in unique ways to create emotional responses,
sometimes using those words in vastly different ways than we do in ordinary
speeches. It’s also one of the oldest art forms; no on really knows when the
first poem was composed. Just that it was thousands of year ago.”
If
you want to know more about poetry, consult www.poets.org,
the home of the Academy of American Poets. Their site says: “Literature is, and
has always been, the sharing of experience, the pooling of human understanding
about living, loving, and dying. Successful poems welcome you in, revealing
ideas that may not have been foremost in the writer’s mind in the moment of
composition. The best poetry has a magical quality—a sense of being more than
the sum of its parts—and even when it’s impossible to articulate this sense,
this something more, the power of the poem is left undiminished.
“In
a proclamation issued on April 1, 1996, President Bill Clinton declared
“National Poetry Month offers us a welcome opportunity to celebrate not only
the unsurpassed body of literature produced by our poets in the past, but also
the vitality and diversity of voices reflected in the works of today’s American
poetry…Their creativity and wealth of language enrich our culture and inspire a
new generation of Americans to learn the power of reading and writing at its
best.”
Poetry
is not just about the substance of content but its style of form. Limericks,
iambic pentameter, rhyme and other forms all fall under poetry. The themes vary
from birth to death and all shades and stages of life in between. Poetry can be
emotionally serious, humorous, or descriptive, It can be read by 100 people,
and you’ll hear 100 interpretations of it that no one agrees on.
Poetry,
for all of its strengths and weaknesses, has been with us for many, many centuries
and millennia, and I hope it shall continue to be with us even if I haven’t got
a clue as to what most poems mean.
“The
very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world xxx will pass into
history.”
--George
Orwell
“With
fact and opinion now presented side by side on the Internet, who know what to believe anymore?
With no filters and no vetting, readers and xxx these days are readily exposed
to a steady stream of pure partisanship.”
--Lee
McIntyre, Post-Truth
PLEASE
CONSULT THESE TIMELY RESOURCES
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at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels much more important when discussed in
the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2020. Born and
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This was named one of the best book marketing blogs by Book Baby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs and
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