If I’m being quite honest, I have never cared much for poetry. Every year in school growing up, there came a time in english class when the teacher would introduce the poetry unit to the dismay of myself and many others. I saw it as monotonous and confusing, as well as highly unrelatable. Topics were often those related to love and sadness, and I struggled to connect to these ideas as a suburban prepubescent boy without a fairytale romance in my life.

Recently in ASTU, we have begun reading poetry centered around the attacks on September 11 and its aftermath in the US and abroad. This experience has been different for me than prior exposures to poetry, particularly because I feel like the subject material is more relatable to my life than a boring love story. While I was a young child in 2001 and did not have a direct connection to the attacks, I grew up in America throughout the aftermath and felt the effects quite heavily. The Iraq War was ongoing throughout my years in elementary and middle school, and I heard a lot about it living right near Washington, DC. Every year in school we would have a large memorial service on the anniversary of the attacks, with survivors and military officials in attendance. I vividly remember how strict airport security got in the early 2000s–one time my mom forgot a camera at a chair while in the bathroom, and the airport security destroyed it due to its potential to be explosive. While I do not have strong memories of a pre-9/11 world, I do remember all of the changes that came from it.

Cover of “This connection of everyone with lungs”
Photo from https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520242951

The ability of poems to depict collective trauma and shared memory, such as that seen in Juliana Spahr’s short book “This connection of everyone with lungs,” has given me a new perspective on the value of poetry. I strongly relate to the feelings she expresses throughout her poems–the anger of ever increasing senseless military operations throughout 2002/2003, the sadness at the rising xenophobia in the US, and much more. These feelings are a part of the collective memory of many Americans, and sadly still persist to this day. Her poetry isn’t in the form of a sonnet, or a form of repetitive drawn out rhyme (her first poem is actually quite repetitive in all fairness). She writes in a way that I feel like I can understand, and I can see the pain she feels watching the direction the world is heading. The feeling of defeat, knowing that so much harm is being done by the country you call home, is quite disheartening. In writing about topics like this, it could easily come across quite sulky and hopeless, however in Spahr’s poems I feel a sense of hope through the darkness that is really inspiring.

I don’t understand why poetry is taught in high school with sonnets and love poems. It seems as if students are being trained to dislike it from a young age. I know it sounds cliche, but the poetry we’ve read in this class has actually made me rethink my opinions on the genre and want to give it a second chance.