Creativity has been on my mind. Expressing myself by unearthing any truths I’ve come to understand, and releasing passions that boil within and emerge screaming into the world, or those that sneak up on me on cat’s feet and purr until noticed. Such epiphanies are paradoxically unlike anything else others have expressed while simultaneously capturing the exact same essence others have experienced.

Poetry at its best accomplishes the important task of combining individual articulation, particular phraseology, collective sounds, imagery, and personal wisdom with experiences, emotions, discoveries, and understandings common to all human beings. At times, poetry serves as the first face-to-face rendezvous a person has with a particular truth, one that has been ineffable for him up to that time. The poem becomes the bridge allowing him to float across the chasm to understanding and finally recognizing something he lives every day or may have encountered elsewhere in his past.

Two examples, one that introduces an emotion others have felt, but not captured in words; the other a simple description that captures the essence and power of poetry and the nature of life. Shakespeare’s Shall I Compare Thee is a sonnet that poses the question of whether the speaker can compare his lover to a summer day. The answer is no because summer days are sometimes stormy, too hot, or otherwise unpleasant. And, he continues, unlike the summer season, he believes his lover’s beauty will never fade nor will she ever die

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Others have felt a supreme love for their partners, and others have felt or believed their partners to be incomparable in their inner and outer beauty. Shakespeare immortalizes his wife, resurrecting her each time the poem is read by another human being. 

Just astounding.

The second poem, also quite famous, is William Carlos Williams’s The Red Wheelbarrow. I confess I thought this short poem absurd and completely unimportant – despite its first two lines –  when I read it as a young high school student.

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

Imagery that startles with its sharpness, with colors contrasting and textures intermixing. A tableau in motion and exceptionally fleeting. A water-glazed wheelbarrow will very soon dry. Chickens seemingly never at rest will shortly disappear from view. This moment in time, like so many others each day, will be nothing more than a memory, if the moment is ever noticed at all. And that is what makes this brief instant of time – and poetry itself – essential. Poems capture for an eternity those uncelebrated moments, scenes all too abbreviated. In this poem it is the instant when a red wheelbarrow still has rainwater running along its sides and white chickens scamper about. Another poem may capture the fleeting time when one’s children were toddlers, too soon morphing into adolescents, teens, and young adults. It remains a time parents can never, ever revisit. 

Poetry captures the prosaic and points to it as something much more beautiful, special, meaningful. Much does indeed depend upon it.

Living in the moment allows us to recognize, to appreciate all that transpires around us. Poetry allows us to appreciate similar moments in case we’ve overlooked them, or to relive them through another’s eyes. It seems to me that those who desire to be creative need to live in the moment and have the discipline to record and craft their observations into those forms they deem most appropriate and which most appeal to them. The topic is the life we have right here, right now, and of course, “The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns . . .” The transcendent power in the universe, at once knowable and unknowable, hasn’t anointed in particular only one group on this planet to be its spokesman.

We are all qualified to wonder and question the purpose and extent of our existence in this universe.