Finding Poetry in the Everyday

What is poetry but wonderment? A convergence of displaced words that describe the understanding of a need for speech as a response to a stimulus that is all but discernable in its essence of meaning by a vocabulary determined centuries before the potential item of discernment manifested into a poem. Capiche?

Words always have been for playing, to me. Poetry is a reflection of a playful spirit. This to me is the essence of poetry’s big bang. Not the heady importance of what the poem could mean, but the experience of the poem, the language that (if we are attuned to imagination) defies and describes the very thing that captures our attention in the first place: sunlight; behavior; a pretty girl; a heckler in the crowd.

Poems can obviously be written about anything, in any style (verse, blank form, as an experiment using mathematics or shreds of newsprint). But what a poem embodies is the discovery of moment, that race of blood to the intellectual muscle when one experiences an idea, concern, joy, sympathy, curiosity.

What a poem is not is an uncaptured moment – whether kept private in one’s heart or publicized in words – it must be appreciated to be truly experienced.

How you come to that is simple. It involves two tools you already have: a direct relationship with the tangible world; and at least some level of awareness that this relationship with the tangible world is unique and limited in duration.

Once you are able to come to terms with this simple collaborative situation, you may begin to experience a bit of the wonderment that is so often blamed on the Muse.

But this isn’t an article about how-to write poems. This is a commentary on inspiration.

Inspiration, wonderment, being human are all very much intertwined and poetry is one very prevalent ornament of our existence here as a species on this planet. It is a testament to our collective ability to notice and manipulate our surroundings.

Being in tune to our surroundings is the key. Finding the poetic turns of phrase, light, and coincidence in your every day experience is the basis for all poetry. And like anything, the more you do it, the more you do it.

Poetry is habit forming. First you begin to notice things, then you want to apply words to those things (as a note or a journal entry) but the words aren’t quite right. You look in your thesaurus but those words aren’t right either, at least not the way they’re put together, so you come up with something on your own, something that says exactly what it is you are reflecting on in that moment.

This is poetry. Wonder on the page, or in your heart. So long as it is being experienced, somewhere, by someone, it will always be.