They told me my poems needed meter,
A cadence for every syllable
To keep it in line
In line
In line;
Says who? I said.
Poetry isn't like song,
Where one person defines it's rhythm
And how it should go
From now until the end of time;
Poetry is alive and flowing,
New with every reader,
In their voice, in their time,
In the cadence of their own tongue,
And its beauty is in
How high and how far and how true it flies.

About This Piece

My love of poetic imagery began in sixth grade, but I didn't embrace it for myself until much later, when I began breaking its rules.

For my English teacher that year, Mr. Saavedra, the poetic form was the pinnacle of artistic expression, and I credit him with igniting my interest it. He taught me all the components of a poem: the types of meter, the structures of stanzas, the differences between allusion and alliteration and assonance. We studied poems, from William Shakespeare to Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Walt Whitman.

While I'm sure we studied free verse, it was the rules and regulations of poetry that stuck with me at the time. A poem, to my mind, had to follow certain structures, rigid and unyielding. My early enthusiasm for the form faded as I explored what I thought to be broader forms for building unrestrained imagery, character transformations, and complex metaphors.

Then a few years ago I began reading poetry again, this time for myself, and found a world where the "rules" centered less on rhyme and rhythm and more on intense reflection, on drawing out layers of emotion, and on describing the complexities of the world as it is and as it should be. The components of meter and structure were not boundaries, but tools that could be leveraged precisely when and where they were helpful.

That was probably what Mr. Saavedra had been trying to teach me, but my still-developing, rules-oriented brain wasn't ready for it yet. Now, though, I'm grateful for both those lessons in the form and function of poetry and the freedom of exploration and experimentation I've found.

Because once I put a poem out into the world, once I let it out of the cocoon of my mind, it has a life of its own. It flies, it soars, it falls sometimes, but it always transforms, new upon each reader's reading. This is why I so love to hear from you, as you encounter my work – the things you see in them, the things they mean to you, give me insight into an entirely different life I never knew they had.

This is beauty; this is poetry.