WHY POETRY?
POETRY:
Fully Human! Fully Alive!
Poetry is powerful and playful. Poetry can be a platform and a playground for creativity, intellect, emotion, and spirituality.
Poetry promotes living authentically with one's self, with others, and with the environment. Poetry is as much about personal experience, perception, and reflection as it is about writing. It expands the depth and breadth of what we take note of, how we process experience, and how we reflect on the world around us.
Poetry enhances skills in communication and understanding. These skills extend to all forms of expression, learning, and understanding.
Poetry builds empathic bridges. Poetry-based writing enables us to explore, name, and voice our own experience and to imagine and try on other voices and lives. Reading or listening to poetry, we hear others' perspectives and stories, some familiar and some quite different. A great pleasure of poetry is recognizing our own thoughts and feelings in the experience of others.
Poetry fosters dialogue and builds community. Poetry gives voice to our hopes, fears, questions, and opinions. Poetry-based writing is an avenue to share our thoughts and feelings with others. Doing so in a Poetic License workshop builds connection and community while strengthening relational skills.
Poetry is a safe haven. We all need to escape from time to time, especially young people facing the challenges of discovering their way and themselves. Poetry is a socially responsible venue for self-expression. Reading and writing poetry is a healthy alternative to risky escape behavior and other actions with potentially counterproductive or harmful consequences.
Poetry is a level playing field. Young people who readily do well in school and those for whom school is a challenge can equally succeed in exploring poetry. Likewise, poetry is equally well suited for adults comfortable expressing themselves and for adults who find self-expression challenging. People for whom English is not their first language often find poetry a comfortable genre to navigate.