By no means am I a poet. Maybe sometime I’ll dig up some of my old poetry and prove it.

In college I learned a great deal about poetry, much of which I’ve probably forgotten, and grew to appreciate the form in ways I hadn’t before. I have to credit a big portion of my getting into writing early in college was due to one of my teachers, poet John Poch. There’s an infectious love of language in poetry that can be inspirational, and it’s structured in a way that forces the brain to work in ways it normally doesn’t. If more writers read poetry, we’d probably have better prose works. I’m ashamed to say I’ve definitely lapsed in my poetry reading.

It’s kind of unfortunate that in school only the dusty old classics are typically taught. There’s so much great poetry written today, but none of it gets any acclaim. Like any art, it’s been refined and polished to such an extant that modern poetry bears little resemblance to the stuffy abstract constructs of old.

For the curious, my favorite poem is Ozymandias, by Percy Shelley. It’s always stuck with me for some reason.