By Alexis Ramsey
Round Table reporter
Time moves liquidly – dripping
Syrup s
l
o
w over
loose limbed faces of the
Clock
Too fast – too slow; mashed
no hope of separation
mixed by hands:
The imperfect chemist
To blink away a day –
and an age
Some days sticky on fingernails
Catch me if you dare
– Samantha Weaver, MHS sophomore
Poetry has been around since spoken language began, hiding in songs and epic stories, forming words into pictures and expressing emotions through verse.
Though poetry may conjure an image of Virgil of Ancient Greece or Edgar Allen Poe and it may be thought to be out of date, there are still a lot of poets, even here atMiddletownHigh School.
How poetry is defined, however, depends on the person.
I know you fret, dear
About the state of your skin
The imperfections you trace like constellations
In a clouded morning mirror
But you don’t hide under your jacket sleeves
Like a bird from the winter
It doesn’t matter; I know well your broken pieces
I’m not counting them
I can only hope to brace the parts you lack
A novel written in Braille
My fingertips, too small and slow
To read it all
But I’ve glimpsed such sparse rays of light
Through the trees, the last sounds of summer singing
Towards their death
It’s a scary noise but you never run
So I find it in me to sleep at night with windows cracked
Electric feeling pulsing like carnival lights
Know, I won’t pull my hair out
If you don’t let me
And I won’t spend my life afraid of the changing seasons
Reminding me that time leaves nothing to remain
My nails will grow; my eyes will open and close
I will throw the worst of everyday away
If you want me
And my words, I’ll hang them from your walls
Smothering your nightmares up
Blaming it on something as cheap and bloated as love
A dream that belongs to the ghosts in my head
Are you one of them?
I promise not to mind, nor to stray
If I can speak all those languages
Only we understand
I’m filled with a longing I cannot say
And I hope that is enough of an argument
To convey, all you are is exactly what it should be
(It is the world, the stars, the sun to me)
– Rachel Barton, MHS senior
MHS senior Rachel Barton said, “Poetry is a way to transcend human morality and create a lasting documentation of the miraculous spectrum of human emotions.”
Or as “Poetry is a human being trying to put emotions into words,” said Jacob Watkins, MHS freshman.
To some, poetry seems more like a connector between people.
“I think poetry is a way to release something that is inside of us while trying to communicate and connect with others that may be experiencing something similar,” said Sean Haardt, MHS social studies teacher.
So why use poetry instead of other written forms?
Part of it can be attributed to the tradition of poetry, which is likely as old as the spoken word itself.
“The earliest form in the English language was ballads and those were all sung initially,” said Becky Reickel, MHS media specialist.
Because the language was spoken, not written, poetry, being shorter than prose, was easier to remember, said MHS English teacher Kelly Headley.
That tradition continues in music today, said Headley. A lot of music is actually rhyming poetry, she said, and if the music is taken away from the words, this becomes apparent.
No fairy tale ending
Once upon a time
I wanted to be Molly Bloom
“…yes I said yes I will Yes…”
I wanted to hear my name roll of your tongue,
like Tom Wingo in The Princess of Tides
saying “Lowenstein, Lowenstein, Lowenstein”
as he drove across that bridge
But our bridge is one of despair,
a bridge of sighs,
like we crossed in Venice.
Yet in Venice we were poetry
in Venice we were in time
and you whispered you were mine
Watching you watching me –
we were a symphony
it was the greatest time of my life…
But it didn’t last.
You kept me,
like Rapunzel,
in an ivory tower
but the ivory turned to silt…
you swallowed me whole
embalmed me in semantics
entombed me in the earth.
Your warnings,
like Daedalus’,
eventually fell on deaf ears.
You thought I’d melt
plummet to my death…
you mistook me for Icarus –
but I etched out a new myth,
no longer followed you, like Oz,
down the yellow brick road
to “the laughter of the immortals.”
Instead, I tried,
like Sisyphus,
to find intrinsic value in all things.
And I was victorious
unexpectedly bowled you over
like a woman
delirious
at
the
moon.
– Daria Baldovin-Jahrling, MHS creative writing teacher
Nonetheless, the poetry in its more formal forms does not enjoy the popularity it once did.
“It is not the way it was,” said Daria Baldovin-Jahrling, MHS creative writing teacher.
Perhaps part of reason poetry has a diminished role in society is because of the difficulty in getting poems published. Baldovin-Jahrling said getting poetry published is considerably more difficult than doing the same with prose.
Still, many people, including many of Baldovin-Jahrling’s students, write poetry either for publication or personal use and consider themselves poets.
Baldovin has a creative writing class and said that she has gifted poets every year.
One of her students Gabby Bronson, a MHS senior, said that creative writing class “is fun and allows you to dig deep into yourself and let all of your feelings come out”
Bronson also says that she uses poetry as an outlet to help when her emotions are running rampant, saying, “whenever my emotions are overwhelming, it helps me to write it out. So I usually write about what is going on in my life.”
Baldovin herself writes poetry, as have Haardt, Headley and Reickel.
Baldovin has written about her children and has put a poem for each of them into their senior yearbook.
Composing poetry doesn’t require a special writing spot or subject. Haardt used to write poetry while riding the bus to work inHouston. Reickel wrote about her golden retriever, and Headley would simply write about the events of the day.
Not only teachers or students in creative writing classes work in the genre. MHS senior Brendan Raleigh said that he is “a competition-winning poet.”
Obviously, poetry is still about, whether in assignments for class, hiding in songs, or sneaking out in doodles along the margins of paper.
MHS junior Victoria Ward believes that poetry has value that will ensure its role in people’s lives.
“Poetry is the metaphoric writings of life,” she said.
