Of falling leaves and loneliness

l(a leaf falls)oneliness...

"Poetry is the concretization of the abstract... the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions... the lava of imagination that prevents its own eruption... blah...blah...blah..."

Let the poets -- both living and dead -- define poetry. As for me, poetry is simply a liberating force.

Poetry imbues me with the power not only to manipulate words, but also to create them. Poetry doesn't confine me within the bounds of standard vocabulary or prescribed grammar. It gives me the freedom to see what I want to see in a moss-covered stone, in mouth-watering plums or in a falling leaf. I don't have to give a hoot about what critics (with Ph.D. in literature) have to say about a poem; I am the critic, I am the poet.

They say that when a poem has been written down, the poet dies. S/he dies a "poetic" death, so to say. S/he no longer owns the poem. S/he is simply the source of the words on paper, which, in and by themselves, are nothing more than the printed words. It is the reader who makes sense of that seemingly nonsense, meaningless, silly doodles of random thoughts.

I'm a big fan of the Fantastic Three: William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, and Walt Whitman -- three unconventional American poets. I like them not because they wrote outstanding poems. The fact is, some critics find them rather "unartistic" and their poems, "pollutants" in the orderly and musical world of fine-sounding poetry. I like them because they're stalwarts and mavericks. I like them because they're rebels with a poetic cause; because they dared to be different, to follow the road less traveled.

Their poetry doesn't have to rhyme or to sound musical to be "heard." Their poetry doesn't have to sound artificial and contrived just to be categorized as literary as the sonnet or ballad or ode. They are simply... poetic.

And, one other thing about poets: it is believed that most of them led a lonely life. The price of being different? The consequence of not being understood by average minds?

Perhaps , e.e. cummings has something to say on that, lying hidden in his poem about a falling leaf and loneliness.



[NOTE to ENG 5W STUDENTS OF MS. H: What thoughts do you have about the art of poetry? Who are your favorite poets? What do you like about their poetry?]