But What Exactly is Poetry?
Poetry is that awkward love poem your teacher reads in class. Poetry makes up the verses of the Holy Qur’an. As a poet, our job is to try to put into words the feeling of a newborn seeing their parents for the first time, and an old man on his deathbed feels saying goodbye to his grown-up children for the last.
In the words of Toni Morrison, poetry — and by extension, all writing — “is a way of thinking.”
The Individual Level
All of us know how to “poem” — you know all those nursery rhymes you learned as a kid?
Have you ever watched Apple’s 1997 “Think Different” ad?
Or what about Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”, recited at President Biden’s Inauguration?
All these are examples of poetry. Since they are so different, suffice it to say: poetry is about someone talking about their experiences, and letting the experience speak for itself.
Obviously we poets need tools to make this happen — let’s take a small example, using a poem I wrote about Slack and Zoom:
I love Slack,
I hate Zoom,
I love Slack,
How about you?I know — pretty simple huh? But let’s dive deeper into some of the techniques:
- the poem uses repetition — “I” appears on almost every line, highlighting it’s a personal experience,
- the poem also has some rhythm — you can feel it roll off the tongue, giving it a quick beat,
- you could also sense some assonance — I reused the “o” sound between “Zoom” and “you”, so the flow of the poem feels nicer.
For sure there are more techniques poets can use (e.g. imagery, metaphors, similes, etc.). However the most fundamental part of the poem always comes down to the experiences it’s trying to express.
Moving Our Way Up
But what happens when you want your poem to connect with others? What can we accomplish with poetry on the collective level?
Time for another example — this one a small excerpt from Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”:
If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.This is an example of what poems accomplish in the right context — in this instance Gorman uses shared values to tie together our experiences as Americans. It unifies us by our desire to have “might”, to show “mercy”, while being “right” — which is a really pertinent thing to do during an inaguration speech!
My First Love Poem
Earlier today I worked with my fellow Make School students Alberto Dominguez, Jordan Bales, and Farhan Begg to make this sonnet:
How do I love my terminal? Let me count the ways.I love termi to the x, y, and z positionsMy soul can reach, when reading out of the stack traceFor the ends of the error lineI love termi to the level of the directoryMost dark theme, don’t use the lightI love termi freely, as programming strives to compileI love termi purly, as he runs a functionI love termi with a passion put to useIn my old desktop, and with my environment errorsI love termi with the permission i seem to lose (use sudo)With my git commands, I use termi to push into main.Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,I shall but love termi with all my brain.
In our case, we’re all software engineers and we chose to right our most valuable tool, the Terminal. We took heavy inspiration from Elizabeth Browning’s sonnet, “How do I love thee?”, and decided to instead change the phrases to express the feelings of being a software engineer. As you can see, we gave the Terminal a loving nickname, “termi”. We speak to specific experiences that mark our dedication to our tools, such as reading through a stack trace, trying to get our programs to compile, and using the Git CLI to push our code to a public repository. We didn’t change pronoun “he” for the Terminal, as that’s just a holdover from the original (but technically it should be “it”). Otherwise it’s a very intellectual experience, which we emphasize with the the last phrase in the poem, “my brain”.
There You Have It!
Poetry is a skill I believe best developed through practice. The most important tool you have is your own inspiration, and there’s no shame in making mistakes. I learned this from a VR Producer at Google, who told me, “everything’s a work in progress”. So don’t be afraid to write (and hopefully share) your own poems!
