Arts Institute Blog

  It’s that time of year again: school is looming on the horizon, temperatures are rising, and it’s raining every day. All of this means that it’s time for me to commit myself to sending out my poetry to journals. One of the biggest issues with sending out poems is that I never feel like they are ready to go. Stay home little poem, you’re not ready for the real world yet! But in the name of practicality, they’ll never be ready. Ever. Art is so fluid that it always evolves, and the best we can do is to capture it at some stage of it’s progression. Think of it like a photograph of a basketball player about to shoot the ball. The ball is frozen in his (or her) hands eternally, and for anyone who didn’t see the entire game, the photograph is their connection to the game–the game doesn’t exist outside of the photograph. For anyone who did see the game, they know that the ball left his (her) hands for the rim and may have gone in–the photo was just a moment of the game.

It’s not really something we think about as artists, I don’t believe, that our works will never be perfected or completed. But it reminds me of a conversation I had with Li-Young Lee when he was in Columbia for Asian Arts Week. I had written poems in response to a few poems from his first book, Rose, and I made a point of letting him know the titles of some of the poems I used. “How did they go again?” he responded, and I recited the bits that I could remember. He got this big grin on his face and started to chuckle, and before I could ask what happened, he says “That poem has changed since then, most of them have.” Even though the book was widely published and adored, even perfected (according to some), they had to change because he had changed, and because time had passed.

I’ve had the opportunity over the last few months to work with youths in the arts, specifically in the writing of poetry. I really had no idea what to expect: would they enjoy it? Hate it? Think we’re boring? To my surprise, they loved it. Even if they didn’t complete the tasks exactly how I’d envisioned them (for example, haikus were premdominantly three paragraphs instead of three lines), I think that the children really do benefit from having a creative outlet and being asked to think outside of the traditional math and sciences mindframe.

 My first experience with poetry came in elementary school as a one-off exercise–just write a poem. It was in my language arts class, I believe, and it was an exercise that I simply did not do. Who writes poems? Pffftttt was part of my response, while my other response was How the heck do I do that? And soon after my non-completion of the exercise, the writing of poetry in my life slipped into oblivion until my second year of college. Literally, throughout my 12 years of pre-college education, I was asked to write poetry once. And hated it. And when it came back again in college, it was something that I was ready to embrace and fully appreciate.

 While this may all seem like just a rant at this point, it isn’t. I had never been asked to be creative in a way that I could use, and it’s something that I wish would have been different. We never know in what subject a child may blossom, and the best thing that we can do is expose them to everything–including the writing of poetry and fiction–early enough, and let them choose what they enjoy enough to stick with.