Part of me has always wanted to believe there’s an alternate universe where poetry is the universal language. Everyone speaks it to varying degrees. Writing is taught in couplets and tercets. We live in stanzas. Free form is the new novel. Sonnets are the only way to give people a reason to believe in life after death. There is an eternal repetition of people shouting from street corners how to exist. Can you imagine?
Can you imagine a world where poetry helps us understand where we have been? Where we are going? The space in-between the two are the margins–the blank spaces on the page where invisibility exists and becomes universal, too. We become something different when the text is on the inside and we are not.
Can you imagine a world where poetry is mostly what we use to understand ourselves and others? It’s a tool that is used to wrestle with our disagreements; a wrench for the tight bolts, a needle and a thread for what needs stitching afterwards, a shield for the protection we are looking for every time we meet someone new.
Can you imagine that you are as you are right now without changing at all? Thoughts and skin and abilities all the same. Habits and writing unequivocally unchanging. We change not; we move for the sake of moving as we always have, we adopt nothing for the sake of changing nothing. Can you imagine?
Late last year, Rainn Wilson (most notably, Dwight from the TV show The Office) tweeted this:
We live in an age without poetry.
— RainnWilson (@rainnwilson) December 23, 2016
Considering it was almost Christmas, I felt it necessary to give him something that he doesn’t know is there. That hadn’t manifested itself until now.
National Poetry Month comes around every April. This month, I’ll give you some of my favorites. I hope you can get something from this art–some written, some spoken, all touching and heartbreaking and capable of making you, too, start to see something that you hadn’t known was there all along.
I will present you with an opportunity to engage with pieces written by writers who are doing the same thing that we’ve all been trying to do. To live–exist, perhaps–in a space that values our right to do so. To breathe. To hope. Feel, although faint at times, a sense of belonging in world that doesn’t seem to always be the softest.
Though I’ll have much to say, I’ll leave that to the voice inside your head.
Enjoy.
#NPM17
#NationalPoetryMonth
R. Francis Williford 