By KEVIN KAUMANS
Tell me, fellow reader, do you know what Poetry Month is? Go on, take a guess. That’s right love, it is the month where we talk about poetry. In all seriousness though, do not feel bad if you have never heard of this before.
Afterall, I myself never knew about this until this year. I suppose this can be blamed on the Education System rather than our own intelligence.
That being said, I hope I can at least trust that you know what a poem is. This is especially true if, like me, you are an English major. I do not have an exact number, but I would say that roughly 50% of the writers we cover are poets.
While everyone has their own type (sonnet, free verse, elegy, haiku, etc.), it can be agreed upon that all poets should be talked about in their respective genre.
For example, my all-time favorite poem is, as some people already know, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Elliot. Like most famous American writers in his time period, Elliot was a modernist. This meant he was a writer who challenged his readers to question what they consider “literature”.
See, despite the poem’s title calling it a love song, the story told in it is quite the depressing one. It is told from the eyes of an aging man whose insecurities stop him from approaching women.
It makes one wonder, then, just why any poet in their right mind would give this story a romantic title just as that? Simple: Elliot wrote this poem to make us ask ourselves what can and cannot be consider a poem. Who has the right to say what a poem is or is not?
Even if you are someone who finds Elliot to be an overrated example of what makes poetry good, you cannot say he was afraid to challenge the norms of writing.
In fact, this is why Poetry Month is so important in the first place: It teaches us young students to question our reality, to challenge our beliefs on what makes something worth reading.
I am not saying all this to get people into the trend of reading, not because you want to, but because someone told you to, however.
Instead, I am saying this because I want people to learn how to draw their own conclusions. If you do not like whatever it is you are reading, find something that you will.
We have too many people in our society nowadays who just follow along with what everyone else is doing because they themselves are too afraid to think.
Poetry, and all of literature as a whole for that matter, does not exist for the sole purpose of creativity, and I feel as though a lot of people tend to forget that.
Literature is also about focusing on the shelf; What do you want to do in life? What inspires you to get out of bed every morning? What is your reason for living?
Many of us forgot to stop and ask ourselves this. In our modern society, people’s thoughts are so drowned out by advertisement, hustle culture and everything else going on in the world that they do not have much free time to look into themselves.
Everyone is so content with waking up, going to work and turning off their brain all day because they are tired of the mindless slog that is working at a job that you hate and going to bed to do it all over agian, that some of us may ask what the point of it all is.
Some of us are probably sitting at home right now, asking themselves: “Why do I bother? No one cares about me. It has been so long since I have been happy, why keep going?” among other things.
But here’s the thing: No one’s life is perfect. Even if you have someone in your life who you think is flowing through with no problems, I promise you: They do.
Stop worrying about what other people think. Find what you like. Learn to create. Learn to express yourself.
I know it may not always be easy to do that. But everyone should try at least once.