Poetry Response

I love poetry. I really fell in love with listening to recorded readings of Shel Silverstein's children's poems. They are, in my opinion, the ultimate creative challenge of writing. "Bone" by Mary Oliver on the surface looks like a poem about, well, bones. But in reality, it is a musing on the state of the soul. Everyone has one, and everyone needs one, but it's intangible. It can't be seen, felt, or understood. Great poetry has always been able to convey a message beyond the blatently obvious, which is where poets have a greater task in front of them than other writers do. "Bored" by Margaret Atwood is a poem about boredom, a subject that we as college students are all too familiar with. Poetry, however, is personal. It need not apply to everyone, and that's half the fun of writing it. It is a raw and honest expression of what is on our minds or in our hearts. I think it's safe to say that many of us will never become poets, but the ability to condense an entire story into such a confined amount of space still applies for our purposes. -Joshua Boyak