Poetry is something, But what

First my disclaimer: I am not licensed to teach, but neither are parents, and that has not stopped any one from sharing what they have learned through experience in living, which is normally called advice/butting in/gossip, or out of a book, called education.

Well let me get on with it then. Poetry can be readily identified by site as a piece of writing with lines of similar length, arranged in stanzas (paragraphs) and sometimes having a rhyme. We all heard nursery rhymes when we were but wee small babies, most by Mother Goose, The Brothers Grim and even made up rhyming poems by our mothers. Not all poetry rhymes they don’t have to, heck they really don’t even have to make sense. There are plenty of official rules for writing poetry depending on the specific form that is chosen involving the length of meter, number of lines per stanza not to mention the number of stanzas and repetition used if any. Poems can even be written out to actually make a picture on the paper.

And yet poetry is so much more then form, to me poetry is the combination of form that melds the words into something more. Form leads the eye and heart to evoke a feeling or a sensation from the reader and even the writer. That feeling or sensation can be anything from disgust, laughter, tears, and everything in between including just plain ol’ confusion as in “What the heck?”

Some of the best poems are written in very easy to understand words that say exactly what they mean and don’t lead you on a wild goose chase trying to figure them out. Speaking of what a poem may mean, just because the poet wrote a piece with a certain emotion and picture in mind does not mean the reader will have the same experience with that piece.

I believe what we experience when reading pulls from all that we are at the particular time we read or hear the poem. It is our own experiences of life, where we have been physically, mentally and emotionally, and the way we are feeling in that given moment that evokes a response. This is why so many people can have such different opinions on a piece of poetry.
We are all the same, human with flesh, blood, guts and emotions. Right? But we are all so very different. Sure we have commonalities with other folks and form into groups but everyone in the group is not exactly the same. It is okay that you like something and someone else does not or that someone else “gets it” and you don’t. This is why we all have our own voice whether it is one we use to speak out with or one we keep to our selves.

You can love, like or even hate a poem but how will you ever know if you don’t read one?

For your entertainment or not, an Insult Poem.

F. L. Akey

I luckily saw
some of your work
Recently.
A couple times, actually.
First when the half price
store was tossing
them out after the
seventy-five percent off sale.
And then on the bottom
of the vulture’s exhibit
at the zoo.
Yeah, to me that says,
The works of F. L. Akey
is just a bunch of crap catching debris.