What can you learn from poems?

Poetry can teach you a lot of things, just like reading. People write poetry about amazingly diverse things, and so reading poetry can teach you about those things, and about the ideas of the author.

Writing poetry can teach you even more. Poetry is a great way to learn how to be concise. You take a big idea, and effectively shrink it down to bumper-sticker size. That helps people learn how to choose the right word, instead of having to write for several sentence to get your meaning across, poetry can help you to get it across in one or two lines.

Poetry can also teach you something about beauty. Sometimes, just reading newspapers and web pages, we forget that the language can be beautiful... that words can paint pictures... that our keyboards can be used to make amazing works of art. When you read poetry, you remember those things, and suddenly, words are more friendly. Language doesn't seem awkward anymore. With poetry, you aren't standing in front of someone you like, getting everything wrong... with poetry, finally, you get it right. You say what you want to say, exactly the way it SHOULD be said by everyone who has ever been in love.

Here... be scientific. Try an experiment. Go to this poetry site http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/p180-list.html and find some titles that appeal to you... read at least 10 poems. See if it is more interesting than reading the paper. :) You might learn something. You won't like them all... I don't like them all. But I like some of them a LOT, and most of them a little. There is beauty there, even in the poems that are about ugly things.

A further experiment would be to pick a topic and try to do what they do... take an idea or an emotion or an event and communicate it to someone else in short little lines. Maybe if you read enough poems, you can figure out why they are using short little lines instead of sentences and paragraphs... and maybe you'll write a great one. :)