What Poetry Means to Me

I definitely love poetry ! When I read poetry I escape from reality, and it helps me relieve stress and understand myself better. Poetry to me is art, emotions, therapy for the soul, imagination, love, hurt, and more all in one reading. Also, I like poetry because it is succinct, and sometimes I have to concentrate on every word in order to detect the meaning that the author intended. It is like a puzzle. Despite the fact that we studied poems of famous poets of different cultures and time periods in school which I loved and influenced my perception of classical poetry, my great love of poetry began in my youth, in the nineteen seventies. It was the years of "street poetry" in my city of Baku. I often heard the poems more than read them because many young poets wrote controversial poems, and they were not printed because of strict Soviet censors. Often I heard only a few stanzas or lines of poetry, which were loved, remembered, and mostly passed through word of mouth. At that time many students and young people developed a passionate love of poetry. At that time I thought that this mystery lied in the verbal texture - a certain pattern of harmonies and visual images, which carried the energy and beauty. Later, when large collections began to appear, and even whole books written by poets whom I knew, I had the opportunity to look at each poet in a different way. In my mind, seeing the written word created a new concept for me, which could be called a poetic personality. It is pretty simple. After reading a large number of verses or books written by various poets, in my mind I see a certain person who wrote it all, and this became important to me as I learned to trust, respect, and even love that person - this deepened my viewpoint of poetry. I do not like the concept that any rhyming text is a poem. Without ideas, symbols,