“Poetry: A Portrait in Motion”, by David Alan Lucas

I met David Lucas through the St. Louis Writers Guild. Recently, at the Missouri Writers Guild, he was a whirl of activity–making everything work as it should.

David is a poet, genre writer, and blogger. His blogs show his multi-dimensional interests: writing, self-defense, and dating locations in and around St. Louis.

Today on Riehlife he’s sharing his poem “The Migrant Jungle,” and a guest post “Poetry: A Portrait in Motion.” –JGR

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Poetry: A Portrait in Motion
by David Alan Lucas

Students often come out of High School with a notion that poetry is a form of writing that is meant to be flowery and exist only to swoon women. Rarely will college courses touching on poetry change this point of view. What these students fail to comprehend is the role poetry truly plays in literature and in life. Poetry is the expression of not only the soul but an observation of life captured in time—a portrait in motion.

The oldest stories of civilization are told in poems as it is the easiest way to memorize and transmit information from town to town before the invention of the printing press and when literacy was not as common as today. While technology has changed, and perhaps because of it, poetry has taken on an important role of showing the world as it exists today. Poetry can project a romantic view of the world or it can show the world the reflection of that world through the dark reflection in an all too clear mirror. It is this reflection that preserves the world as the poet sees it at that moment.

The portrait that the poet has painted with words along lines and stanzas can be appreciated and dissected at the same time. By examining the poetry, the reader can glimpse into the poets world and examine it through the word choices that the poet has written. If the poem touches the reader, the words are carried with the reader much like pollen seeds on the wind, and the portrait is passed on from reader to reader to give it an infusion of their own meaning to the world the reader sees.