You Are A Poem

Poetry is feeling, and you are a poem. “Hold on,” you say, “I don’t like poetry. Poems are confusing and metaphorical and dense. I got a C- on the poetry unit my senior year in high school and I’ve never looked another poem in the eye again.” Poetry refuses rubrics, and you were told you didn’t understand well enough when you did.

You are a bewildering, symbolic, and complex poem because you feel. Poetry has been and always will be inside you. When you show how you feel, you are your singular self. There’s no way to copy paste, Google search, “Buy Now with One Click,” or AI generate the poem of you.

When you know, when you think, when you believe, you are exercising all that has shaped you by way of environment, culture and instruction. We carry that influence everywhere we go in our bindlesticks, briefcases, fanny packs, and pocketbooks for when we need it most. They are the useful tools we need to survive in the world we’ve created. We put on the suit of belonging and walk to the offices of productive citizenry each day. 

The poem of you is in your body, speaking each time you laugh, dance, cry, seek out eye contact with another, stare into the clouds without interruption, trace the invisible air with your fingers, trip on a sidewalk chunk, flail, fail in public. Poetry is a physical act of emotional expressions we were taught not to trust and to hide instead.

I think a lot about how students in public school systems respond when a teacher steps out of teacher mode to share a secret silly skill, or they make an obvious mistake and respond rather than ignore and move on, or they reveal a side of themselves that isn’t a part of the lesson. Those are the moments where the teacher becomes the poem, and the students experience a role model being vulnerable, and the lesson becomes the poetry of humanity. 

When Chris and I go out as Foolbright Scholars into public spaces to sing spontaneous songs, engage in rankling delight and invitation to feeling as we dance with uninflected balloons, we show what it is to feel and to be present with the folly of feeling. We shape an image or story in a short period of time, something brief and real. We know nothing and anything can happen and we are full of feeling. We remind others that feeling is what we are, it makes us living poems, and it is what connects us. We see the audience, and let them in. We are everything and nothing, all of the time.