BC Poetry and Empathy Discussion – Description
Craft a thoughtful response (of at least 100 words) to one of your peers:
Hello everyone, I hope you all are well. My name is Taylor Gorny, and I hope that this class will reignite my excitement for writing.
I don’t read many books, but poetry is something I can read all day. Younger me used to be way more excited about reading to gain knowledge, and currently, I’m more interested in short stories, comics, and poetry than I am in reading giant novels or thick nonfiction books.
I spend quite a lot of time on social media, and one of my favorite kinds of content to consume is poetry and writing. One poem from one of my favorite online poets–under the alias L, E–went viral, and for good reason. It explores the topic of human interaction with animals, especially animals smaller than us. Inspired by Althea Davis’s writing on mice, deer, and moths, L, E crafts “ten legs, eight broken”: such sorrow-filled poetry that makes you want to weep over the killing of a spider. L, E has this incredible ability to humanize the inhuman, while at the same time bringing in much more relatable ideas. In this poem, a few lines read, “If I was the same but looked different; / maybe you wouldn’t hate me … Maybe you would have shown me mercy.” This part of the poem for me elevates the idea of “I’m going to kill you because you scare me” to human interaction. Our world’s history is riddled with this concept, and we still struggle with it to this day. I love this poem dearly, not just because it makes me feel such deep empathy and grief for a creepy little thing, but because the overarching message and theme of this piece can be applied to the human condition as well.
Thank you for reading. Best of luck to all of you in this class!
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