Ray Crisp explores today’s very relevant topic of the Poet and the Laureate! We are all proud of the youngest Inaugural National Youth Poet Laureate, Amanda Gorman as she read The Hill We Climb last week to the world. Ray provides more Laureate information here!
What is Poetry? What is Prose? What is a Laureate? And why are these important to us? These are important topics because communication is essential to all of us for survival and these are the means by which we communicate
We usually talk and write in Prose, that every day speech that we easily understand. Prose is that every day speech written down. Now there are varieties of prose, such as a business letter, an essay or a diary entry. And the type of prose takes on different forms with different expectations of word choice, tone, usage and punctuation.
Poetry is for communication as well, but more of an emotionally based form that can convey feelings and attitudes toward someone or something. And within poetry there are many types such as a sonnet, lyric, ode, and free verse. Here again expectations for word choice, tone, usage and punctuation are needed to convey the meaning and to create perhaps an emotional response or feeling.
Poetry began many years ago because we are a story-oriented people, and many of our family and societal values and histories were communicated from generation to generation through stories told in poetic form. The rhythm and rhyme of the stories helped us to enjoy the stories as well as remember them.
And we as humans valued those the techniques, stories, and the methods so we honored those story tellers…we gave them “laurels,” praise and admiration. Thus a Laureate.
The State of Missouri, along with just about all other 50 states, honor our poets by selecting one from time to time as our Poet Laureate. Karen Craigo is this year’s Missouri Poet Laureate, and she is the fifth poet to be given that honor. Appointed by the Governor, Karen is a Springfield poet and journalist who will have the title through this year. Ms, Craigo also explores writing and publishing, and creativity on her blog, Better View of the Moon. For a complete listing of her works, including her 2018 work, Passing Through Humansville and her 2016 collection titled, No More Milk, visit the internet for complete information.
In short, what makes a poem a poem is the ability to make the reader feel something. As has already been mentioned, a poem is different in form from prose-the normal rules of writing just don’t apply. That doesn’t mean a poem can’t have form or punctuation, but it doesn’t have to. Poetry uses image to convey meaning while prose finds concrete description more effective.
In Every Day Is Mother’s Day, Karen Craigo captures the emotion that many, if not all, of us feel from time to time. And she captures our feelings in a very direct and purposeful way, telling someone else’s story of everyday life with its uneventful happenings except for our thoughts. And in that story, each of us can see ourselves with the strong emotion created by Ms. Craigo’s words, cadence, and image.
Every Day Is Mother’s Day
Right now in a picturesque
village–seaside, houses painted
in bright but faded yellow, the trees
fruit-bearers, but it’s spring
and they’re in flower–you can see
a woman walking down cobbles,
swinging her canvas tote, face
tipped a bit to morning sun, and she
doesn’t suspect her quaintness
or charm–for her, the day
is quite ordinary, though perfect,
secretly, by at least a dozen metrics,
and she even has a mom and plans
to call her the first chance she gets.