Begging for a Poetic Renaissance: How the Written Word is the Most Accessible Art Form
By Bella Kovar
Image by Athena Merry
When I think back to the first time I wrote a poem, it gets a little blurry. I’m not exactly sure how I started using it as a form of self-expression. I vividly remember writing about a boy I had a crush on in the seventh grade. He had big blue eyes, and I wrote something very juvenile but sweet about comparing them to the ocean. Though I think I wrote other things even before then, and I don’t exactly remember. I had my first diary in the second grade, and even if it was gibberish, I know I wrote some sort of content that would have been deemed as poetry-adjacent. The act is more of an instinct than a decision. I believe this is a common realization amongst all artists.
Poetry has been around for centuries, especially popular in ancient times with writers like Homer and Sappho. The torch was passed on as the years have trickled…Shakespeare, Dickinson, Keats, Whitman, and more notable figures for each respective generation. In pop culture now, poetry manifests most frequently as lyrics in music. The written or simply spoken form of it has become a lot less common. Although poetry is a medium for catharsis, like any art, there is a certain component it has that makes it stand out. The creation of it is very bare bones, just a few words on paper. Other forms of expression are able to use multiple senses in order to digest it—sound for music, sight for physical art. Even novels utilize more spheres of the mind than a few stanzas of a single poem, since an entire new world is being built to entertain the reader.
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As a poet, you are limited, but at the same time, the directions you could choose to take are limitless. You could use a certain rhyme scheme or form, but there’s also free verse where you don’t need to follow any rules at all. The act of writing a poem can also be a communal activity or something intimate just for you, or perhaps one other person. Anyone can write a poem. A ‘bad’ poem has some sort of merit since it is an attempt at deciphering a certain feeling about a person, a situation, or an encounter. One could argue that this could be said about any art form, but the written word doesn’t beg to look a certain way on a canvas or appeal to the ears like the production of a song may. It’s merely a process of interpreting the ground beneath our feet, the sky above our heads, or attempting to capture the things deemed as ineffable universally for anyone who speaks the same language to try and understand.
As a poet (or poetess, I recently discovered that word and have been obsessed, it seems much more powerful and embraces femininity) in 2025, I’ve found that poetry is a form of art that can be easily overlooked or taken for granted. Attention spans are growing smaller, and with AI on the rise to help young students in literature classes interpret poems instead of using their own creative discernment, it frightens me that poetry will eventually become whispers in the background of a world that needs the outlet the most. Poetry is beautifully human and only needs to be approached with feeling and authenticity to work. It can be a form of journaling, reflection, and a puzzle for those who are trying to make sense of their days. Approaching poetry with intention, whether reading or writing it, can give immense and indescribable rewards to the soul.
I encourage everyone to write poems—even if it never makes it out of your notebook or Word document on your computer. Poetry can be absolutely anything you want it to be, even if it’s just a little murmur about the eyes of someone you love.
Image by Athena Merry
