April is National Poetry Month and the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program is offering five free workshops to help writers get into the rhythm (or the meter) of writing poems. Each features state and local poets laureate, and enrollment remains open.
- April 2: Braiding Uncertainty and Possibility: A Poetic Exploration with Glendale Poet Laureate Raffi Wartanian
- April 4: Finding Poetic Pathways to Share our Truths with Altadena Co-Poet Laureate Sehba Sarwar
- April 9: Meaningful Steps into Poetry with Orange County Poet Laureate Gustavo Hernandez
- April 11: Feng Shui Poetry with West Hollywood Poet Laureate Jen Cheng
- April 23: I've Been Here and Never Been Here: Writing Poems About Place and Displacement with California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick
The Writers’ Program boasts a number of ongoing classes dedicated to poetry. UCLA Extension Newsroom asked the instructors to reflect on what poetry means to them and why it is an important creative outlet.
What you're asking is as complex and varied as the human experience because poetry is an expression of the human experience. Audre Lorde says in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” “As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring ideas.” Poetry pushes us into radical imaginings of the future, which is what makes it necessary, and why it's so often discredited.
Art keeps us from indifference, and poetry not only requires us to read differently, but also to engage with language and structure in ways that challenge us. Poetry keeps me cautiously optimistic. It makes me rethink, for example, something like grief. In poetry, grief can become a bridge. It can move on the page in ways that perhaps you yourself cannot always move in real life, for one reason or another. Its practice requires love and patience, and bears a gravity to which we as humans constantly readjust, a mysterious force from which we kick and reach forward. It becomes evolutionary in how we take another look at the world and, then another, and it is also a return to earlier, freer curiosity, like how we might feel less like strangers to the imaginations that once so guided us in our youth.
Poetry is the most egalitarian art form, allowing anyone to participate, requiring just a modest vocabulary and the desire to hold a mirror to your soul. Poetry gives me purpose. Poetry is how I explain the world to myself. More importantly, poetry is how I’ve come to understand myself.
Poetry is the beginning of language; it is our first language. It's the form we reach for whenever we want to connect with our deepest and most creative impulses. It is the form most of us reach for when we want to communicate a feeling, thought, emotion that we must have understood and no other form will do. I am passionate about poetry because it is an enduring art that is available to all ages, abilities, generations, languages and time periods!
Poetry brings joy and gives me voice – and no one can take that away, especially as the violence around the world spirals out of control. Poetry grounds me in the moment, so I can stop along the Arroyo Seco to listen to the owl hoot from her perch on the sycamore tree before going home to write. There, I can mediate on my patio and smell spring as jasmine flowers bloom. Poetry grounds me before I read the news or prepare for another protest alongside allies as we refuse to be silenced.
Poetry is the shortest distance between a feeling and its expression. It can be therapeutic or a puzzle, a game or a call to action. It’s an act of noticing and an engagement with mystery. Why read and write poetry? To connect with the foundation of all literature and learn to write the only way there is: line by line. For me, poetry has led me into a deeper knowledge of myself and into a community of writers that I cherish.
Poetry is in everything. It's how you see the world around you and connect with the tangible and intangible. Poetry is the language that nurtures you and bends to help you make sense of everything you are experiencing. Its power is in the connectivity of things – that fact that all humans experience much of the same general things, but each of us has our own unique flavor/ sabor, making it enticing and comforting that we are not alone.
Poetry is our voice and our humanity, that can tell the same story with so many different flavors, that will make sense to just about everyone. Most importantly, the language of poetry can resonate with everyone and touch an emotion, which can be often life changing, life making, or life giving. Long live poetry! Que viva la poesia!
