By Stephanie Barbe Hammer
Friends: Here’s hoping the socially distant holidays have not been too difficult and that you and your family are healthy or are on the road to recovery.
As we begin a challenging new year, I’d like to share that in hard times, human beings have always turned to poems. Did you know that poems are the first word-art that people ever made, and there is not one culture on our planet that does not have poets and poetry? There is no language where poems do not play an important role. In other words, we are hardwired to want and need hearing or reading poems.
We are also hardwired, in my humble opinion, to make them. My brilliant mother-in-law declared for years that she was not a creative person, only to become a very fine poet after she became ill with pancreatic cancer and started taking writing classes.
My advice: Don’t wait until you’re dying to make a poem!
In the Poet-Try classes that I have been teaching for Inlandia for almost 10 years, I tell students exactly what I just told you. Every person has it in them to make a poem, and probably every person has it in them to make a bunch of them.
So why not give it a try?
Let’s make a poem right now. We’re going to write something that is called an “occasional poem” – which means we are going to write a poem in honor of an occurrence.
It may interest you to know that Jan. 3 is both JRR Tolkien Day and Chocolate Covered Cherry Day. It is also Mind-Body Wellness Day, and tomorrow, Jan. 4, is National Spaghetti Day, which my husband Larry is very excited about.
Why not write a poem in honor of one of these occurrences?
You can just start writing something, and that approach is called free verse. Walt Whitman made free verse popular in the US. Modern poetic forms like rap can be free verse also. So, if you’re a rapper, go for it!
If just writing or rapping feels hard, you can write an acrostic, I’ve written about these before, but just to remind you: An acrostic poem uses the letters of a word as the beginning letter for the first word in every line that you write.
For example:
Christmas and New Year’s celebrations are over sadly but guess what?
Happily sweet things remain even as we nurse our hangovers and
Even as we put away the ornaments, the candles for Kwanzaa and Chanukah.
Right around the corner is Valentines’ Day, we reckon, is
Reason enough to hope for something luscious, in whose honor we whisper then shout
Yes, to National Chocolate Covered Cherry Day!
Reading down my poem, you’ll see that I’ve spelled out “cherry” with the first letters to the first word of every line.
Or, what about writing a letter to JRR Tolkien, telling him how much you loved or hated his books? An occasional poem like that is called an “epistolary poem.” You could even write a poem/letter to Frodo or one of the other characters.
And some free-styling rap about “The Lord of the Rings” would be awesome. Just saying.
I’ll leave to you to think about the mind-body wellness poem, but I’ll bet you could write a doozy.
Try writing a poem today. If you enjoyed your experiment, consider writing more poems! Does someone you love have a birthday or anniversary coming up? What about writing an occasional poem for them on their day? An occasional poem is a wonderful gift.
Finally, to bring this article back to its solemn start, what about a poem expressing your appreciation for your local hospital, nurse, doctor or anyone you know involved with the 24/7 labor of saving lives? This kind of poem is called a “praise poem,” which is a poem of gratitude and acknowledgement
Happy poem writing, happy National Chocolate Covered Cherry Day and THANK YOU HEALTHCARE WORKERS!
Stephanie Barbe Hammer is the author of the poetry collection “HOW FORMAL?,” the novel “The PUPPET TURNERS OF NARROW INTERIOR,” and the novelette “RESCUE PLAN” (Bamboo Dart Press, Feb 21). Learn more about her at stephaniehammer.net. and learn more about Poet-Try and other creative writing workshops at http://inlandiainstitute.org/workshops/
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