by Byron Hoot

Poetry is a calling out, like education is a pulling forth, of what’s inside in an alignment of experience and words to who we are, to what readers and listeners read and hear and the validation of the nod of the head, the low hum of agreement that says, “The words have broken through.” 

Shape-shifters are what poets are going into the known to come out in unknown ways with the discoveries not anticipated until, almost in commonsense, they are presented to us to be taken as our own.

Nothing lets us see the possibilities as clearly as poetry, the creative imagination doing what if done anyplace else but on the page, in the heart, through the mind might never be started.  Or finished. It is the laboratory of understanding and perception, grasping and holding.  The worst that can go wrong is the language is not understood; the best, that spark of which we know nothing of but know it is is struck and we see, understand what has not so been before.

Each time someone says, “Oh yeah” to a poem something good – in a much broader sense than morality – is birthed.  We have seen through the eyes of another and that makes our vision clearer.

The meaning of the experience of the moment speaks. And we decide, through its craft and in our hearts, if it is worth listening to.  Poetry calls and each are given the chance to heed or refuse the call – the call, though, matters.