When Poems Come to Life

 

        One of my favorite parts of our Poetry Unit in English class is our activities with experiencing poetry. Although analyzing a poem and its devices is interesting, I enjoy having the chance to enjoy a poem for its emotional and intellectual experience. Listening to poems recited by the poets that created them has especially helped me to see poetry come to life in new ways. 

When you watch a poet recite their own work, the nuances of emotion become more apparent. An example of this would be Elizabeth Acevedo’s recitation of her poem “Hair”, which we watched in class this past week. When reading, her passion is accented by her facial expressions and hand gestures. Even poems that were not originally written to be a part of the spoken word genre can have this effect. Maggie Smith’s reading of her poem “First Fall” underscores this idea. When she began reading this poem about her children at the 2020 Palm Beach Poetry Festival, her voice automatically softened and took on a gentle tone. It was as if she became lost in this moment with her children, and the rest of the audience was invited along as well. It is live readings of personal works such as the ones mentioned above that give audiences the exciting opportunity to strongly feel the emotions of the author or the speaker they have chosen to portray. 

Below I have included a video of Maggie Smith reading her poems, “Sky” and “Rain, New Year’s Eve”. I hope you enjoy watching these poems come to life. 

 

A Poem is a Story

 

For as long as I can remember, I have always thought that poems were simply tiny packages containing the direct thoughts of the poet. After spending some time analyzing poetry in English class this past week, I have realized that this is not true. Although poems are much shorter than traditional novels and even most short stories, they contain versions of the plot and characterization that these longer works have, even if they are created in different ways. 

As an example I will use Sir Phillip Sidney’s “Thou Blind Man’s Mark” , which is a poem that we analyzed in class. The poem begins with the speaker addressing desire and criticizing it’s terrible qualities, by saying, for example, “Thou web of will, whose end is never wrought”. By the end of the poem, the speaker feels he has achieved some kind of intellectual triumph over desire and victoriously proclaims, “In vain thou kindlest all thy smoky fire” in order to belittle it. Although there are not scenes of action like would be expected in a novel, there is a clear change of emotion that is similar to the kinds of emotional changes that occur as a result of the action in longer stories. In a poem, the action oftentimes takes place in the mind and feelings of the speaker instead of through activity, and this is what makes up the plot.

Poems also contain characterization. In “Thou Blind Man’s Mark”, the personification of desire allows it to be portrayed as a monstrous and destructive being. The line, “For virtue hath this better lesson taught” characterizes the speaker as someone who values breaking away from group habits if this is the morally correct thing to do. By using poetry’s characteristic metaphors and carefully chosen diction, the poem is able to assign attributes to characters that move the plot along and create meaning, as they would in a novel. 

Although poems are small, they contain the same literary might as lengthier works.