I didn't know what to say. I was wearing a tee shirt from my high school's literary magazine, and the night before the staff of my college's magazine had met to discuss recent submissions. This thirteen-year-old, bored in the face of innumerable rules and forms that meant nothing to her, understood poetry the same way I did when I was her age: it was small. Stories were big and poems were small and it never occurred to me that a poem could genuinely move me.
I publicly read a piece for the first time my sophomore year of high school. It wasn't extraordinary, but the experience was. As preparation, one of the magazine advisors brought in some local poets to coach us on reading, and I heard slam poetry for the first time, and I was taken aback by the way words tripped off their tongues and they let their words fall into convoluted patterns and subjects that somehow ended up all coming together. I think that's when poetry became alive for me. I began to see how words felt and moved together, carrying meanings bursting to be heard. Words were never again stationary — sometimes they needed a push or some rearranging, but they didn't want to sit still.
My senior year of high school, I was Editor-in-Chief of our humble little magazine (though we tended to call it a book, as it pushed two hundred and fifty pages). We didn't have poetry readings, we had Coffeehouse, and we didn't have to scavenge for guests; we seated them on the ground because we ran out of chairs. My friends, my acquaintances, and people I'd barely seen became my family as I watched them stand up before their peers and share a piece of themselves. An advisor's friend, a blogger, reviewed our little event and I was so proud. High schoolers were supposed to be apathetic and bogged down by poor funding and test scores, but we were excited, and about the strangest of things — poetry. The way I well up when I think about it is the way I feel when I watch someone in front of me spin words up and around and make me feel an issue or a situation or a moment, or even watch my favorite poems performed, over and over again, on youtube.
I'm not a poet. Sometimes I write, but mostly I listen and try to find a way to help the world see what I am privileged to see. So how do I show this girl that internal rhymes and meters and metaphors and ideas can come together beyond the examples she sees in class? How do I convince her that every word has a meaning and that she can harness that meaning for herself?
How do I prove that poetry isn't stupid?
