By Polly Alice McCann
Poetry has helped me through difficult times. It has saved my life more than once. When I discovered poetry through a regular 101 class, the professor made us analyze a poem. I chose one about a potato that was thrown onto the compost pile. It was by Jane Kenyon. I was able to write 5 pages about a poem of hardly 20 lines. When I cracked open that poem and discovered so much about this person, and so many possibilities, I was hooked.
I took the poetry writing class next. During that period my grandfather died and we flew to Kansas City for the funeral. When I wrote a poem about the walk to the funeral home from my grandmother's house, something happened. I wrote how the flower seeds inside my pocket sprouted and grew sunflowers as large as cabbages how crows began following me as I walked. The poem broke open and unreal things sprang to life. The poem was magical. The poem was fantasy but the poem was truer than reality.
This January I will have been writing poetry for 20 years and each time I try to break open the poem and find that magical kernel of being that is truer than it is real. I've written over 500 poems and my goal is to write as many as Emily Dickenson, but not as many as Pablo Neruda. How did poetry help me through difficult times? Because it taught me the truth about myself and my situations, my relationships, the truth about my emotions, and my spirituality, and the magic of everyday adventures. To me, every day is a trip to Disneyland or down the Amazon. Because even just throwing out a potato, or driving past a carton of strawberries could be the answer to the universe, or at least my answer for today. Poetry helped me to friend myself. And that is what I hope writing whatever genre you feel drawn to, will do for you.