World Poetry Day was officially March 21, but we can celebrate poetry all next month, as April is National Poetry Month. We don’t really need to have someone designate a special time for it, for poetry has been with us in some degree or form since before we were born and will remain in us for as long as we live. We can celebrate it any time we choose to.
While we tend to think of poetry as related to cleverness or wit in the use of language, it may be related to music as much as it is to words. Even before babies have developed their own heartbeats, they are subjected to the rhythm of their mothers’ hearts. That universal ka-thump, ka-thump remains with us for as long as we live, and it is the familiar rhythm of most of the world’s poetry, music, art and dance – no matter what the language or culture. It is the rhythm of life and was reflected in ordinary speech long before humans developed an awareness that certain arrangements of words were more pleasant than others – long before we named those arrangements “poetry.”
For a long time after mankind developed a spoken language, instinct and the awareness of that heartbeat rhythm somehow made people more comfortable than erratic, more awkward utterings did. Rhyme came later, but made it easier to remember the stories, myths and tribal lore that were passed on from generation to generation before the advent of writing. This continued for centuries, even after there were books to record those stories and history, because books were expensive and many of the people were neither wealthy enough to afford them nor educated enough to read them.
Until fairly recently, the study of poetry in schools was mostly limited to required memorizing of certain classical poems – I recall struggling with the complexities of Longfellow’s “Evangeline” in junior high and the odd spellings and usages of language in Shakespeare’s sonnets in high school. My efforts at writing original poetry were encouraged by a few teachers, but for the most part, creative writing assignments were limited to such mundane topics as. “What I Did On My Summer Vacation.” I believed, as did most of my contemporaries, that poetry must rhyme as did the nursery rhymes of our childhood, and that all “real” poetry was flowery and profound. We did not take Ogden Nash and e.e. cummings very seriously as legitimate poets.
When my own children were in school, I was pleased to see that poetry was included to a greater extent than in my school years, though there was still the sense that the haiku poems that were taught to fourth grade students were intended more for building vocabulary than for any appreciation of the genre. Still, I doubt that the average high school graduate of that time could begin to list nearly as many poets’ names as they could the names of NFL quarterbacks or Academy Award winners.
As an art teacher and designer of the Picture Presenter Program that flourished in Solon’s Lakeview School for twenty years, I tried to plant the belief that art is for everyone. Some people balk at attending art museums and art shows, saying. “I don’t know anything about that stuff.” Well, of course they don’t, and never will if they continue to refuse to look at art and learn. There are so many kinds of art that there is surely something for every possible taste and interest. It is not necessary to embrace the whole gamut of styles, media and subjects. Yes, that rhythm exists in poems, in contrasts and colors in art, in the tones and volumes of music and patterns and movements of dance.
Most people understand that everybody has a liking for some form of music – another of the things we humans have developed out of some primal need, and we accept that it can be available and enjoyed in many forms. The same is true of art, dance and poetry. These things would not have developed and endured for thousands of years if humanity had not needed and valued them. They are necessary to our being human, so be a little more human next month and read a poem, then write one – a racy limerick, a soppy love poem, a rhyming grocery list – anything. Just do it.