Poetry: Truth in its Sunday clothes? By: [my real name!] Brought to you locally by punk rock and techno So many great works have been done over the course of human history. Many of these works are under the literary style of poetry. What is poetry though? Common definitions are what poems consist of: rhyme, rhythm, meter, and basic concepts that you see in works ranging from Robert Frost to Iggy Pop. There’s another, more technical part to it though. Human truths, emotions, expressed through words. This brings us to the word “truth.” Obviously a truth is the absence of lies, a recollection of what really happened or is. Truth is a constant that runs parallel to falsehoods it seems. Poetry is this constant captured and pinned down in ink. The truth in poetry isn’t the same as telling your parents that you broke the vase and not your little brother, it’s a different kind that defines who and what we are. It’s the writer’s inner thoughts formed in ways that can be interpreted in a million ways by one person and a million ways by another. The way poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes is that it’s the cleaned up, pretty-to-look-at form. Truths by themselves can be pretty ugly but when put into the form of a poem they can seemly change drastically in contrast. A poem about the brutal, bloody experiences of a man at war can seem look like a field of flowers if made into poetry. A great example of this is the work of popular poet Edger Allen Poe, he wrote some of the darkest tales that seemed (slightly) lighter due to the poetic style of his writings. Poetry is truth all dressed up an ready to blow some minds.