During my first semester of my MFA in poetry, my workshopprofessor sat us down and she asked us what we were planning to do, since “poetry was a dying art.” That discussion left me gutted. A world without poetry; I cannot imagine.
I’ve been writing poems seriously since I was eleven years old. My identity is so deeply rooted in the fact that I write and read poetry, that much like ivy, growing into the fabric of a building, it’s utterly changed me. If you tried to separate the two of us, I would start to crumble. I wouldn’t be who I am, without it.
Not to mention, poetry has been my primary means of making contact with the outside world. My life would be wholly insular. Most of the people that I’m in contact with, I speak with because of poetry. My days are filled with it. I’m hard at work on my second collection, and simultaneously, I’m writing a review of someone else’s chapbook for my blog, and I just got off of Twitter, where my whole feed is filled with people sharing their poems, or the poems of others.
Poetry is far from dead or dying any time soon. Like all art forms, poetry adapts. It will endure, so long as poets exist to write it. Simply put, you cannot kill something thousands are pouring their hearts into.
Bio:Jessica Drake-Thomas is a poet, fiction writer, editor, and blogger. Her full length collection, Burials, is forthcoming from CLASH Books this year. Her work has been featured in Coffin Bell Journal, PVSSYMAGIC, Three Drops from a Cauldron, and others.