POETRY’S BAD REPUTATION

Poetry is something that the majority of people tend to either love or hate, and it’s usually hate. Despite the popular opinion, most of us never actually study the basics in school and always associate it with lessons about Langston Hughes or Emily Dickinson. Like any other genre, there’s a lot more to it than whatever you’ve heard about in English class. There’s nothing wrong with classics, but modern books filled with prose can bridge the gap between plot and poetry. They can be read like a story without having the complexity of something like the Odyssey. They’re much much more enjoyable to just sit down and read, and they show progression and progress. To me, more modern poetry and prose books are like each individual page is holding a piece of the longer story that the writer is trying to tell.

Some of my personal favorites are books by people like Rupi Kaur, Michael Faudet, and Amanda Lovelace, who are all modern writers of poetry that have been unbelievably successful. In my opinion, their work is much more realistic and relatable in this time period. A genre can’t be abandoned just because it changes with time, and like other art, we can’t expect everything to speak to our everyday struggles if it is hundreds of years old. Because of that, we have to be open to change. You may not like much of it or any of it, but it would be a little ridiculous to judge something only based on what it was during different centuries.