My experience with poetry wasn’t always the best, and neither was English. English was never my strongest subject in school, because it involves a lot more out of the box thinking than the mathematic, and science subjects that I’ve always loved. Now poetry was even harder than English, because with poetry the reader needs to think even more abstractly, because what is being said is hidden behind the words, and even the rhymes, which I would have never expected. The fact that even the rhyme scheme and the reason the author may have chosen that rhyme scheme just makes poetry even harder to understand and ultimately write because as a writer of poetry I would not want my writings to be so straightforward like a story,but something that a person would have to think about and decipher when reading.
However, with the introduction of rap music in my life, I found a similarity with poetry and rap. Rap music is many times the same as poetry, involving different rhyme schemes, and different meanings behind the words. I realized that I would listen to rap music, and try to understand what the artist was trying to say, because many times metaphors would be used to convey what they were talking about. Deciphering poetry and rap music is sort of the same thing.
I had an epiphany, that if I can understand rap music, then poetry should not be much harder. It may have been all the practice of understanding rap music that I was able to much better understand poetry. I am now able to use all that I’ve learned from poetry and music to write poems myself. They may not be the best, but it is a lot easier to do, now that I’ve gained the experience of first understanding poems and the messages they have. Poetry allows me to take a step back from all the straightforward subjects like math and science where there’s only one answer, and think outside the box, allowing myself to create multiple meanings to a poem. At the end of the day, I learned that poetry and English alike are open to interpretation, and whatever the reader understands from the reading is true.
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