TW: Suicide

About half of my school year is spent competing in speech, more specifically poetic interpretation in which I pick a set of poems that surround a certain topic. So obviously I’m a little biased in how much I appreciate poetry, but honestly, I don’t know how I couldn’t be. There’s this misconception about poetry that it’s always old and white and confusing filled with boring analysis of the same poems that everyone and their mother read in high school. Similar to most art forms, poetry definitely suffered from very white straight and male beginnings but recent changes in society have opened up so many more doors for minority poets. Some of my favorite poems are written by queer people or people of color and I’ll be honest I still groan every time an English teacher hands me a poem written by an old straight white guy but there’s so much more to poetry.

Poetry serves as a cathartic liberatory medium that allows the oppressed to find community and shared experience within suffering. While the idea of performing and thereby trading our pain at a competition for a win or trading it for money is probably something we should be wary of, the specific articulation of an emotional trauma that exists within some forms of poetry is also important. After a friend of mine committed suicide, I listened to this poem on repeat for days and it helped me get through the pain in a healthy way. Specifically, it allowed me to know that the pain I felt was normal and even helped me understand exactly what I was feeling. A combination of rhetorical specificity and emotional appeal allows the performer to directly connect with the audience form a connection that allows the meaning of the poem to be understood, even if not on a conscious level. The specific connection between the performer and audience allows the performer to articulate a message in an emotional way that makes the specific meaning behind the rhetoric much clearer and allows the performer to impact directly to the audience’s emotions.

Within poetry, everything matters, literally, every single word has a specific purpose. Living in such a chaotic world of symbols and advertisements, poetry allows us, well really forces us, to look past the simple meanings of a given topic or even sentence and focus on how it could be interpreted in many different contexts. This specific focus on rhetoric in tandem with an emotional connection between performer and audience allows poetry create a massive emotional response that, with work on everyone's part, fosters community and allows us to start to make sense of this world full of unpredictable events, good or bad.