What’s the point of poetry?
Poetry, a style of literature we have been reading since our childhood, and throughout the years at Melbourne High School, we have been exposed to different styles of poetry, for example, Shakespearean plays, slam poems and soon ekphrasis. Poetry is used to communicate in English, not dominantly through words, but through imagery, play on words, abstract communcation, and the like. They seem to have a life of their own, apart from the regular english language, with a different set of rules, a different set of rules that can be broken, and a different way of expressing information and emotions.
My experience with poetry was quite difficult, tiring and tedious. From a young age of 5, I arrived in Australia in 2008 without knowledge of English and it was hard for me to enjoy poems, nursery rhymes because of the lack of understanding of the language. I never came to love poetry at any time during my schooling, I was previously a poetry hater, but now I feel this has settled a little. I would sometimes read them again and again, and I would look up in confusion with no clue what was going on. I was not able to catch the abstract meaning and the imagery behind the poetry, as all was seen was a bunch of words printed out neatly on a page. They normally took a long time to understand, and if I still could not make the meaning of it, googling was the answer. Poetry for me was tough due to the lack of understanding of history behind English, because some of the imagery and events they refer to are part of Australian history, or something quite abstract I could not understand.
Understanding poetry was always a large weakness for me until the 9th grade here at Melbourne High School, but writing something like a slam poem was still out of my skill range. In the ninth grade, reading Shakespeare was a real eye-opener and it fixed most of the issues I had with poetry in my schooling, and Twelfth Night, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet were plays greatly enhanced my understanding of poetry, although I only enjoyed the play Macbeth. I found Othello quite boring this year because for me, it only reintroduces romantic themes such as Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet. Something like Macbeth was very enjoyable for its great writing and decomposition of the mental state of Macbeth, and some interesting and important themes mentioned in the book that piqued my interest more than Othello. Slam poems for me was an absolute disaster, had I just gained good competency in understanding poems, writing a poem and breaking some rules of poetry were skills I just have not achieved yet, and writing poems this year is already daunting. My slam poem last year came out as a formal speech in the end with like 2 or 3 lines that rhymed.
I’ve come to enjoy poetry a little more than I used to, because of a greater understanding of some abstract themes and imagery and I have embraced the genre of poetry. I feel poetry is most interesting when you read it once, but you do not understand it yet, and you read it once or twice more and from some of the words you slowly begin to understand what is going on. Then you read the whole poem again and think to yourself, “ah yes”, and you’ve grasped the information, emotions, themes and the like the poem is trying to express. I feel poetry is something pretty fun, but without a good grasp of the english language, it is hard to embrace, and fully understand.
