Even though sad boy T.S. Eliot (who was born and raised in St. Louis btw) famously wrote “April is the cruellest month,” April is an exhilarating time to be a reader, writer and admirer of poetry: it’s National Poetry Month, y’all! Whether you’re a life-long fan of poetry’s inscrutable magic, or someone who doesn’t quite get what all the fuss is about, I promise that there’s a place for you somewhere in the wide poetry wilds. To riff on the common idiom, there are plenty of fish poems in the sea poetry. 🐠🌊 And, to extend my metaphor just a bit, like many marine animals who survive in the vast blues of open ocean, I find that reading and writing poetry is an experience best explored, practiced and performed with your community around you.

Poems, after all, function a little bit differently from stories and essays. Nonfiction and fiction titles might ask you to figure something out, to learn new information or to consider a unique or unifying perspective. Nonfiction and fiction often, though not always, have discrete answers to questions like “what’s happening or has happened or will happen” or “who is/was/will be this person, this animal, this environment, this object, this culture, this thing?” Poetry isn’t so concerned with answers, or perhaps a better way to put it is that poetry is concerned with both the asking and the answering, with the experience of questioning, of wondering, of (un)knowing. Ultimately, poetry ask-answers its creators and receivers, writers and readers, to participate in a fluid and multidirectional — even multidimensional — process of meaning or meaning-making.

Continue reading “Poetry Talks: Conversational Forms To Write With Your Friends”