Ode to Poetry

on the revolutionary purpose of poetry, the anchor to my artful sea.

Source: https://rubenista.tumblr.com/image/190023010493

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Last week, I decided I wanted to write an ode to poetry, and until today I didn’t understand why.

In my life and writing, poetry was the key to a world that made sense to me, it took my anger towards injustice, or the pain of heartbreak, and transformed it into a song, my writing voice. In fact, if poetry were an act, perhaps it would be the act of transformation.

In preparation for writing this essay, I took the morning to go through my handwritten poems and skim through the various poetry books I have in my home studio. As I sipped my coffee and read through words that looked like paintings, I realised how poetry and beauty were connected to speak the language of emotion.

Poetry has, through time, been tainted by patriarchy and turned into a writing style, referred to as a genre of literature, pigeonholed and intellectualised for the death of creativity, but it is so much more than that. The word poetry comes from the Greek word poesis, which means to create, and in a broader sense to compose. But if we dig even deeper we arrive at the Sanskrit root pu which means to generate or procreate. Poetry as the continuation of life in a world that wants to kill us.

Poetry is a connector in a hyper-individualistic society, it sits in an interior and dark place where things are born, and it is a revolution from oppression.