Poetry is reflecting
what you feel deep inside.
Be
it on paper or by verbal altercation, it’s as simple as that. Now, I’ve had
people say, “Poetry isn’t my thing”. Or “No matter how hard I try I just can’t
write poetry” and so on and so forth like that.
Well,
excuse me; I’ll have to disagree with you on that single score. Anybody, and I
mean just that, anybody can write poetry if they put their
heart to it. But not too much of their heart or they look like they taking an
entrance exam for the School of the Great By-and-By. Loosen up, buddy. You can’t
write no poem with your muscles all tensed up. Relax.
Now
that we got that out of the way, I should add that we must come to the garden
of verse with an understanding that mastery comes in varying shapes and sizes.
And that’s exactly where many potential poets stand or fall.
I’m using the word potential with the utmost care because you
are either a poet or you’re not. The quality of your line of verse matters not
as the fact that you write poetry. That’s all you need to be a
poet. Write poems.
When
I was younger, I got myself worked up a lot because I believed a standard poem
required a large dose of big vocabularies. You can’t blame the
kid I was though. You should have seen my first collection of poetry books
besides the Nursery Rhymes which I regarded
as childish and substandard poetry. One of my favorite poetry texts was A
Pageant of Longer Poems edited
by E. W. Parker and that’s just one among numerous skull-cracking, mind-racking
collections of poems by classical poets, in my personal possession. So, I grew
up with a belief that was as staunch as it was childish that reading standard,
acceptable verse ought to pay in migraine or at the least, a mild
headache. Any poetry that missed that mark was low on the ratings, mine.
From
Milton’s Morning of Christ’s Nativity to Arnold’s Balder Dead, my young escapades took me through the
works of my favorite classical poet, William Wordsworth. Here’s an
excerpt from a personal favorite,
Our
birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The
Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath elsewhere
its setting,
And
cometh from afar:
Not in
entire forgetfulness,
And not
in utter nakedness,
But trailing
clouds of glory do we come
From God Who
is our home:
Heaven
lies about us in our infancy!
Can
you imagine how easy it would be for a ten year old to get lost in between
those few lines of verse? Lost and totally wrecked out my mind, such was my
dilemma on the road to the mastery of verse. The years, like foam-tipped
breakers have blessed me with a few gifted poets, men and women through whom
I’ve gained my footing and a lot of stamina in the field of cadence. Maya
Angelou (my favorite), Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Audrey
Lorde, Ezra Pound, Laurence Dunbar, Sylvia Plath and many more masters
of the art.
I’ve
done my share of reading up on works attributed to these greats, did a little
extra as a matter of fact, dug up the BGs (that’s short for Background) and
worked the poetic interpretations with those. And I assure you it’s been
non-stop pleasure. I’ll give my thoughts pause, presently. Next time, I’ll be
sure to pick this up right where I left off. Until that time, read a lot and I
mean A LOT of poems.
Keep
your pen bleeding!
Akpan
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