Poetry - the essence of being...

Hey everyone! With Midsummer Poetry Week coming up on the Pink Blog, it got me thinking about poetry in general. And how, so often, we regard poetry as being something in regular verses with a certain amount of rhyme, repetition, alliteration… True, modern “poetry” has broken free from many of these constraints, and “poetic licence” has taken on a whole new meaning. But all this deals essentially with form and structure. But what about the heart of poetry – the essential “something” that makes it a uniquely expressive literary genre?

While mindful of all the poetic conventions and the accepted definitions, I can’t seem to escape the idea that poetry is really so much more. To me, poetry is the “language of the soul” – a deep and unconstrained voice within us all that we can express in so many ways… through words, music, art…

Take the art of sculpture, for example – lines and images and beauty that tell their own kind of story and appeal to the aesthetic in all of us. Or a photograph that stands out, a masterpiece of light and shade and harmony. And what about a painting that strikes a chord, or a piece of music, or a particular line from a song? What is it about all of these things that “talks” to each of us in different ways, but no less powerfully than through the lines of poetry as we usually define it.

I believe that poetry is the expression of everything fluid and beautiful and deep within us. As a writer, with the obvious love for words, I recognise the “poet” in so many narratives and descriptive phrases, feel the power of the poetic gift through the right rendering of a tale. That gift finds many ways of expressing itself. It is a kind of reaching out of the human spirit beyond the here and now. It is vision and freedom and transformation. It is the ability of every human being to transcend circumstance, overcome fear, achieve greatness. And it is the ability to recognise the simple beauty in a flower, a butterfly, the laugh of a child…

Whether we love to dance, to paint, to sing… that is the spirit of the poet in us finding expression. It is eternal, a well-spring of life and joy and simple contentment. It is looking at life with the “inner eyes” of our spirits – with compassion and with wisdom, not to deny the existence of tragedy or pain or injustice, but rather to see beyond that to a gift as precious as life itself. To the gift of hope, and of faith, and of love. It is a way to live life to the full.

We all have it. It’s just that sometimes we lose sight of it along the way…

Thanks for having me!
Jude

Judah Raine
http://www.judahraine.com