Modern Poetry

A few weeks ago I believed poetry was dead, that only songs made enough sense and created enough beauty to be called poetry. I guess I have school books to blame, I used to have this enormous book for literature class, where before some stories, there was a poem. The thing is these poems were terrible, they had no emotion at all, they were about planes and trees. How was supposed to believe poetry was still a genre of interest with poems like that?

I don’t use that book anymore, so a couple of years ago I asked my teacher why were those poems about nothing. The answer was “they are for kids” just like that. Why is that an excuse to write such lousy poems? Kids are not dumb, I think “because they’re for kids” should be a reason to write good poems. Most young people are not interested in poetry anymore, and you can’t really blame them when their first encounter with poetry is about planes. And not in a metaphorical way, just about the plane.

The moment I realized poetry could still happen, was a week ago. I was on this site, where you select your interests and random sites come up. I selected poetry as one of my interests; I did that because I like old poetry very much. I thought the only thing that was going to come up was about old poets.

The first thing that came up was a video; the girl on it was saying beautiful stuff. Somehow I ended up watching this video for 20 minutes; I was so caught up with what she was saying. This girl’s name is Sarah Kay. She is a modern poet who made me interested in poetry again. Made me forget about the planes and trees of the first poems I read. Made me want to find my voice.