Lighting the Way: Poetry As A Language For Everyone
by Mikaela Brewer

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“Poetry may seem an improbable portal into the fundamental nature of reality—into dark matter and the singularity, evolution and entropy, Hubble’s law and pi—but it has a lovely way of sneaking ideas into our consciousness through the back door of feeling, bypassing our ordinary ways of seeing and relating to the world, our biases and preconceptions, and swinging open another gateway of receptivity. [...] We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other.” - Maria Popova, The Universe in Verse (via The Marginalian)

 

“Poetry is a human fundamental, like music. It predates literacy and precedes prose in all literatures.  There has probably never been a culture without it, yet no one knows precisely what it is.” - Edward Hirsch, A Poet’s Glossary (via The Academy of American Poets)

 

“The poem is itself essentially a body, comprised of various parts that work in various relation to one another–which could also be said, I know, of machines, but because poems are written by human beings, these relationships are unpredictable. A successful poem will never feel robotic or mechanized. It feels felt.” - Carl Phillips, Muscularity and Eros: On Syntax

 

“While poetry is considered by most as illusion and delusion, it is the only reality, the moment when we are completely alive.” - Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5

 

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Recently, I was reading a post by the On Canada Project (OCP), which explained the performative nature of many land acknowledgements, citing past history and former stewardship, and how this removes currentresponsibilities to the land and Indigenous peoples in the face of ongoing colonial violence.

 

Their post helped me ensure I’m using active language in my land acknowledgements, but it also made me think about my poetry practice. I wonder if poetry is another plane of land in spacetime—the global collection of which is not unlike the way every body of water is connected—uniquely both a language itself and a vehicle for it. Perhaps we treat it similarly to the ‘Zoom introduction box-checking land acknowledgements’ that OCP points out. 

 

I think of the hundreds of extinct languages, largely lost to the colonization and exploitation of land, people, and culture. We know that Traditional Ecological Knowledge is passed down through poetic forms, and thus poetry is a language we must protect as a critical avenue for decolonization.

 

Poetry isn’t past tense—it’s alive, breathing, always political, and it doesn’t have a single tradition. Acknowledging it as such is vital to our survival. Día Joy Wright, inaugural Poet-in-Residence at SAPIENS, captures this in What Is Anthropological Poetry?, paying tribute to Audre Lorde’s famous essay, Poetry Is Not A Luxury:

 

“For people who are marginalized, poetry is, indeed, not a luxury, but a language. I know it as a searing light through which we might brighten the path toward futures we were told we would never have. For me, it has often been a lighthouse in the darkness, shepherding my ship to port. But it has also been the torpedo fire, the rocket blaze, the missile flame I have learned to launch in protection.” 

 

When we think of poetry, we may be reminded of deconstructing Shakespeare at thirteen or fourteen. We may also recoil in the esoteric air and atmosphere hovering over the poetry discussions we’ve been a part of.

 

I do believe Shakespeare, Auden, Tennyson, Yeats, Whitman, Eliot, Browning, Wilde, Kipling, Byron, Thomas, Milton, Keats, Frost, Blake, and Wordsworth (and many others) are worth reading and learning from. Their work has immense value, but not more than other poetic works. They’re not the standard by which all poems should be measured, nor are they the cream of a poetic hierarchy. They’re considered poetry’s authoritative body because of the pertinence of white (male) supremacy and colonialism, and therefore, in part, the value placed upon the English written word. 

 

Poetry of the global majority has long been dismissed as illiterate or not “real” poetry, particularly if it’s oral in tradition. There’s a hierarchy valuing the written word as more “evolved” than oral traditions, erasing much poetry around the world. 

 

In a brilliant essay, Decolonizing Poetic Form, Emilia Phillips adds, that “Implicit in this argument is that poetry is a product of certain kinds of knowledge, and only those who have that knowledge can write capital-p Poetry.”

 

Phillips further explains that when it comes to the practices of the Western canon—such as strict formalism, which isn’t inherently bad or invaluable—there is an important conversation between access to education and what is considered valuable to know. 

 

Most of us—myself included—don’t know the rich history of collective, communal poetry long before the written word and Western literature canon (which even in itself is reductive—white women were largely excluded). Phillips offers a wonderful example of what decolonizing poetry could look like in Terrance Hayes’s, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, noting how it simultaneously honours the European form of the sonnet (both English and Italian), alludes to a myriad of voices and poems, and braids together the vastness of American diction (such as AAVE and Latinate words). My favourite poem by Terrance Hayes, The Deer, is online here. 

 

Decolonized poetry invites everyone to it, and includes the expanse of voice and tradition. This begins with diversifying our plate of poetic history. 

 

Before we begin, here is the Poetry Foundation's Glossary of Poetic Terms  & the Glossary of Poetic Terms from the Academy of American Poets to refer to. I’ve bolded a few words below to help us begin our own glossary!

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A Non-Exhaustive Sampling of Poetry’s History Around the World

 

The English word “poetry” comes from the Greek word poieo, which translates to “I create/make.” The word “lyric” is descended from the lyre, a stringed instrument the Greeks played alongside reciting poetry. The lyric poem is linked to Sanskrit hymns and is the form many of the poets mentioned earlier wrote in, such as the sonnet. 

 

Apart from other writing forms, poetry has come closest to translating, manifesting, remembering, and preserving feelings, emotion, and culture, with particular emphasis on abstract notions such as love. Prayers, songs, fictional stories and fairytales, historical accounts, instructions/stories for children (the prerequisite to nursery rhymes), daily tasks, laws, political protests, genealogies, and recipes were all once forms of poetry either memorized in verse or song within oral traditions. They were believed to have been recited for group survival and cohesion, using tools like rhyme, meter, imagery, symbolism, allegory, and repetition to aid memorization. 

 

Some of the earliest forms of poetry were hunting songs and elegiac and panegyric court poems recited within communities along the Nile, Volta, and Niger rivers. 

 

The Rigveda (1500-1000 BCE), an ancient collection of Sanskrit hymns, is the oldest of the four sacred texts of Hinduism (the Vedas). The hymns of Sumerian priests likely used early poetic forms, and around 600 BCE, Lesvos’s Sappho wrote erotic Greek verse. Along with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, composed between the late 8th and early 7th century, the four-thousand-year-old Deluge Stone features the story of the Mesopotamian hero, Gilgamesh, in poetic verse, memorized by bards for generations before ever being written down. These stories are two of the “epics,” which were lengthy poems that preserved cultural history, beliefs, and values via language that narrated geography and legendary figures/Gods.

 

Arabic ghazals frequently speak of love and loss in lyrical, strict metrical patterns. Qasidas tend to be longer and explore praise and satire. Muwashshahs have both Hebrew and Arabic roots and are a strophic Andalusian form exploring love and mysticism through rhyme. Between the 10th-15th centuries, Persian poetry—specifically the Persian ghazal—was prominent. 

 

You may recognize the haiku and the tanka from Japanese poetry, known for their conciseness while remaining profound in topics of nature, emotion, and changing seasons. 

 

In China, ancient poetry was strict, rhythmic, and saturated with imagery and symbolism. Chinese poetry distinctly featured intricate meter, tone (level (平) or oblique (仄)), complex patterns, and the quatrain—four lines with exactly five or seven characters per line.

 

Theatre and ceremony are integral parts of poetry in many cultures on the African continent, crafting political, educational, spiritual, and entertaining performances. Musical instruments such as the kora, xalam, mbira, and djembe drum often accompanied poetic performances, and incorporated movement, dramatic gestures, and facial expressions. In West Africa, oral poets and historians were known as griots. Griots composed the Epic of Sundiata around the 13th century, and further preserved and disseminated African history, culture, and traditions. Upon independence from colonial rule, many countries in Africa blended local dialects, pidgin, and European languages to create poetry. 

 

Latin America was also home to extraordinary poetry exploring the struggle for independence, social justice, and the mythology/stories of the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans. 

 

Indian poetry is deeply shaped by the linguistic diversity within India, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Islamic traditions. Devotional poetry arose during the Bhakti movement (7th-17th centuries) and the Bengali Baul poetic tradition of devotional songs (19th-20th centuries) braided Hindu, Islamic, Sufic, and Buddhist spiritual traditions. 

 

Living under totalitarianism is a common topic of 20th-century poetry in Eastern Europe, often influenced by folk traditions, mythology, and surrealism. 

 

Indigenous poetry, globally, often explores land and connections to it, cultural identity, and resilience as colonization and cultural assimilation persist. 

 

The hainteny of Madagascar’s Merina people, the landay of the Pashtun women in Afghanistan, and the pantoum from Malaysia are also very prominent forms.

 

Contemporary performance poetry such as slam, spoken word, rap, songs, and visual poetry (drawing on ancient Chinese traditions), are seeking to resurface and reclaim the oral roots of poetry—rhythm, beat, art, and music embedded within ancient chants, songs, and epics. 

 

Of course, some of the oldest yet most popular poetry lives within the sacred religious texts of the world.

 

I summarized the following sources for this section, but please see the full resources list at the end of this piece! 
 

• A Five-Beat History of Poetry (Google Arts & Culture)

• The History of Poetry (Obsidian)

• The Origins of Poetry & Poetry Around the World (Kinnu)
   

 

What’s Next for The Poet’s Corner?

 

In future issues of The 44 North, the Poet’s Corner will offer a deep dive into one poem, unpacking its craft with accompanying prompts for you to do the same! We will also publish and edit up to 3 poems alongside an artist’s statement. Submit your poems to editors@the44north.ca by January 20th for our February/March issue!

 

And last but certainly not least, here are a few additional poetry resources to explore:
 

• Edward Hirsch’s A Poet’s Glossary | Academy of American Poets 

• A free poetry workshop on Coursera with Douglas Kearney

• A Beginner's Guide to Poetry by Ana Wang + her incredible guide to writing 30 poems in 30 days  

• More forms to try out & more here & here (writing in form is a bit like doing a puzzle—so much fun!)

• Poetry Unbound | The On Being Project 

• Lesson Plans for Introducing Poetry | Academy of American Poets 

• Re: what poetry is, I love this poem, Ars Poetica by Kenyatta Rogers & here is an ongoing collection of my poetry recommendations!

• Poetry Foundation's Glossary of Poetic Terms & Forms

• Glossary of Poetic Terms | Academy of American Poets 

• Education | The Poetry Foundation 

• The Difference Between Poetry & Prose by Howard Nemerov