I stink at writing poetry...

...but boy am I good at spotting it.

As a former (still proud to call myself) English major, I have studied all kinds of literature. I enjoy poetry. ee cummings in particular. But I am horrible--absolutely terrible--at any attempts in creating it. I do, however create poetry in other ways.

Good poetry (in my opinion) invokes imagery. When I read a poem, I hardly ever understand it from start to finish. Poetic language can be very abstract. But the feeling of a poem is for me the ultimate goal, the end result. Think about music videos. Once you see the music video of a song you love, that images from the video will forever be engrained in your mind whenever you hear the song. Poetry is the same. It should invoke the senses, create certain images and still scenes in your head.

Lately I’ve been observing poetry in this sense. Backwards, if you will. I see a scene, and I think, well gosh darn that should be a poem. That may explain my love for photography.

For example, the first time I found myself trying to explain these sentiments, I was received with blank stares (explaining an abstract artistic concept in a foreign language is just as hard as it sounds!). I had climbed a small mountain in a quaint town called Tepoztlan, outside of Cuernavaca. I sat with my two friends, Laura the gringa, and Jorge, a Mexican, on a peak overlooking the town. Not another soul was near. Around us was pure silence, from far below we could hear the shouts of children playing, dogs barking, and cars honking in the town, but the sounds were as infinitesimal (high school vocab word, holler) as the images on a microscope slide. The sun was warm; the breeze was cool. The sky was clear and blue, and every so often a hawk would swoop overhead, in between distant peaks. We had brought a snack: beer and 2 small bags, of Cheetos and Doritos respectively. As I sat listening to the miniscule sounds, relishing the breeze and sun, and feasting on the breathtaking scenery, I couldn’t help but think that Cheetos were the most delicious thing in the world. That was my poem, and I struggled to try to explain it to my friends.









Most recently, as in yesterday, the poem I observed was the whiteboard in my classroom after class. I was cleaning up after the kids left, just about to erase the board, when I noticed how beautiful it was with the peculiar but revelatory set of words splattered like blue paint onto the surface. I didn’t have my camera with me, so I jotted down the words in my notebook in the exact same layout they were on the board. Try to picture the following smattering of words on a whiteboard, in this very layout:



Call me crazy, but that whiteboard was a poem to me.

I'll leave you with my favorite ee cummings poem, which is untitled:

"who are you,little i

(five or six years old)
peering from some high

window;at the gold

of November sunset

(and feeling:that if day
has to become night

this is a beautiful way)"