The Art of Poetry - Gabriel

I have always had a passion for art. The fact that I could create something that would be completely representative of the person and still mean dozens of different things to my audience was something I believed to be unique about art. However, I never really held the same passion for poetry; in fact, quite the opposite. I used to hate the idea of poetry; I found it boring and pretentious. And to be fair, after only being exposed to the world of Shakespeare, I think I had every right to feel that way.



During the past few months I have been exposed to hundreds of poems and dozens of styles and techniques. What is fair to say about each one is that it reflects the writer better than anything else could and this is due to the process of creation. One of my favorite things that I have found in my research is Tristan Tzara’s ‘Recipe for A chance Poem’. The idea behind this is that you could pick random words out of a hat and form them into a poem through this sequence and ‘The poem will resemble you’. Through this lens every poem holds the writer’s purpose because it has gone through the process of creation.



What is interesting about art and poetry is how the audience adapts them. Looking at a piece of art, I can choose to see the things that I want and believe them to depict any emotion or belief that I feel. The beauty of art is that it is completely personal. Recently I found this to be true of reading poetry too; the ways I see poetry is completely conditional of how it is read.



Our class spent time reading poetry aloud and each time, I saw the poem as meaning something else. Whether it was a subtle flick of sarcasm at the final line that created an omnibus conclusion, or the emphasis on the alliteration that gave the poem, or even the change of voices to give objects personification, each person demonstrated their own personality through there reading of the poetry. Just like Tzara’s ‘Recipe’, no matter what you do, ‘’the poem will represent you’’.



So I feel that there are very little ways for a poet to create purpose in his poetry. When writing a poem, one cannot avoid it resembling their own personality and when reading a poem, one cannot help but make it relatable to themselves and their personality.



Poetry is the cohesion between the writer and the audience. Just as in art, we take from poetry what we want. There is no correct way to read poetry, as the subliminal creating of poetry allows the reader to explore ideas that poet did not even intend to be written.