P-P-P-Posts: Talking About Fears and Emotions That Poetry Brings Up

Before I get start on talking about the real feelings and issues, can I just admire for a moment the absurdity that is Daphne's face in this picture? I didn't really notice it until I placed it into the body of the post, but that sure is something. I'm totally keeping it. It's been a long day and I need some fun. I found it quite interesting that Kati Macaluso said that poems hide because I don't see it that way at all. In fact, I think that poems often reveal simple truths in the things that make us emotional and the things that make us think. While literally poems do hide since poems by nature bury the meaning behind a lot of floral language and clever arrangement, they reveal so much more than they conceal. Poems bring to the forefront the deepest feelings and insecurities. Underneath the clothing that we put on it, poetry is human nature in words.

In her Forgotten Items poem, she talks about a worried wife who fears that one day while they're going about their routine her husband will forget her like orange juice on a shopping list. In Christensen too she discusses hardships that have deeply impacted who she is. The thing that most resonated with me was on page 34 where the students are responding to Knock Knock and Harriet says, "'You know, I really like the part during the letter where he says, "We are our fathers' sons and daughters/ But we are not their choices." We aren't the reason they made bad choices. We aren't part of their choices, and their decisions aren't our fault.'" Then Christensen brings into some very specific concerns of her own. She says, "Was my father's alcoholism a genetic stain that could explode my dreams and shackle me to relive my parent's story?"

Thinking of things that are beyond my control, the things outside of myself that shackle or have shackled me in the past really made me plumb the depths of things that have nothing to do with what I've done but affect me no less powerfully. When Christensen spoke of alcoholism I thought of both my grandfathers who felt that affliction. I know my dad's father was a pretty good man but filled with lots of sadness. He lost his first wife in childbirth and then my grandmother, but he abandoned his son. My mom's father really was an irredeemable piece of shit and I can feel the scars that his casual evil left on the people around him. I worry that I could go down that path even though I've never shown any signs of substance dependence. I worry that I'll become my mother. That one day I'll just snap and my mental health will be out the window and I'll never get myself back. So I try to be nothing like her. I spend nights and days imagining that in old age I'll have Alzheimer's like my grandma. That one day I'll lose everything that I've worked so hard for. So I keep my mind as active as possible and I try not to think of it.

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close."                                                                  Pablo Neruda 

Poetry is all about honesty and boiling things down to their essence. I found this fun thing on the NPR website The Week In News, In Verse that I just think is so cool. It's from April 14th of this year and it's a poem documenting all the latest scandals like Stormy Daniels saying that Trump never signed the nondisclosure agreement he had drawn up. Things like this are a great way to weave current events and history into our English classes and it's a different spin on the news cycle, which is so outrageously fast these days that it's hard to keep up with the many updates that occur even in a single hour. Exploring something like this as part of a writing lesson is a great way to look at how information is structured since even though the news comes to us with a seal of genuine fact, even facts can be told in slant. There are all kinds of biases and angles that impact how we few what is put before us for consumption.

What I want to leave with is that poetry changed my life. This is evident by what I said in my paper, but I hope that it shows in everything I do. It saved my life. It is my life. Words became my friends and I want to collect as many of them as I can because they'll always be there when I need them. I'll never be alone as long as I have their song in my heart.