Still I Rise

I never liked poetry, or at least I didn't think I did.

In third grade, I was in a gifted kids program called Reach. I had a teacher who made us memorize Eugene Field's "The Duel" and then she filmed us reciting it.

Beyond the exploitative feel of having a teacher force us to perform one of her favorite poems in front of camera (did my parents even sign a release for this I wonder?), I didn't feel any connection to this poem about a dog chasing a calico cat around.

Then the likes of Shakespeare and Dickinson were force fed to us during the inevitable poetry section in our English class. None of it resonated.

The weird thing is, I was always really good at writing poetry. I tried to convince myself I was writing lyrics, but they were poems cause it turns out I was never very good at playing guitar.

A typical creative writing class had a dreadful cadence that you had to get over quickly if you wanted to last. It requires thick skin and an ability to take advice and adjust.

You would pour your heart and soul into a Word doc, send it to a teacher, who would print 30 copies, and then you'd spend a class having everyone criticize it. Usually I'd see about a forth of the class drop in the first few weeks.

In my first creative writing college level class, I didn't hear anything good or bad about any of my work. I thought it was kind of weird that none of my poems or short stories ever popped up to be ran through the gauntlet. I just sort of assumed it's because they weren't bad, but probably not great either. The teacher was worried about not having enough material to fill a class.

Then one day, late in the semester, the teacher announced we were going to have a different sort of day.

She had been collecting all of my poems for the entire semester because she thought my works stood out. She thought I had something to say beyond the mere assignment she had given us.

We spent the entire hour going over my poems. Yes, there were some criticisms, but overall it was positive. This honestly might have been one of my top five all time days.

I say this because it's one of the first pieces of positive reinforcement that justified what I had been scribbling in torn notebooks for years. It was the first time the feedback wasn't coming from someone I knew that I couldn't shrug off and say, "Ahhh, they have to say that cuase we're related."

It was after this class that I started seeking out poetry that actually spoke to me. Strangely enough it wasn't the classics like Robert Frost, it was either musicians or black artists.

James Baldwin's "Amen", Langston Hughes "I, Too", and Dudley Randall's "Booker T and W.E.B."

But the poem that spoke to me the most was Maya Angelo's "Still I Rise." I was first introduced to this poem by a musician named Ben Harper, who modified the poem a little to fit lyrics in one of his songs.

There's something about these poems that speak to me. The world is trying to keep these people down, but they're too damn stubborn and revolutionary to stay down. They are inspiring works, ones that I cannot ever fully understand because I did not live the black experience in America, but ones that have a universal knowing in the human struggle.