April is National Poetry Month

I could call this post "College Ruins Everything," but in sixth grade I performed a rap song about thinking positive so now I have to live up to my street rep.

Once upon a time aka a year ago, I was a creative writing student of Nameless Utah College. When you go to college for creative writing at Nameless Utah College, they force you to take a bunch of classes about different kinds of creative writing. The first of these classes was a class about poetry.

I have long been a poetry enthusiast. I enjoyed writing poems as early as age eight. Throughout junior high and high school, I would often write poems when I was supposed to be listening in class. Though I didn't aspire to be a poet, I found the art delightful.

The other students in my poetry class had a different view. Poetry was serious, serious work. It was an art form of an epic nature. It therefore had to be within the box of being outside the box, if you know what I mean.

The other students and the professor criticized my poems for being about happy subjects. They told me to write about something sad.

They didn't like that my poems weren't mysterious. They told me to be less transparent.

And, finally, they told me to stop writing poems that rhyme. Because rhyming poems, my professor said, were only for Hallmark cards.

These people were lovely people.I liked all of them a lot, and we had some really fun times together. But I never got past the feeling that they believed only certain kind of poems should be written or read, and that it wasn't okay for me to want to write something else.

This affected me more than it should have. In the several years since that class, I wrote only one poem that I can remember. Until now.

April is National Poetry Month. It's like National Novel Writing Month, but without the cool acronym. Anyways, it seemed a shame to let this month pass without writing a poem. Therefore, I decided to, in the words of Taylor Swift "shake it off," and overcame my poetry anxiety to write a poem for Little Sister. I didn't worry too much about technique, or metric feet, or anything a good poet is supposed to think about. I just wrote it:


Ballerinas have feet.
Poems have feet, too.
Poems like this have a beat.
Ballet beats you black and blue.


Writing poems involves hard words
Like "trochee" and "cinquain."
Being a ballerina is even worse.
Your body's wracked with pain.


There's a moral to this story, if you want to know it:
Never ever ever be a ballerina or a poet.