How I Rate Creativity

First of all, I would like to state that I find creativity to be an extremely personal thing. Studying poetry is an opportunity to gauge how people have changed their perception of creativity over the centuries. One thing I find important is how many questions a person asks. Curious people tend to display a wider range of intellect, and tend to be more "creative." If you like knowing how things work, or stop your class, even if there is two hundred of you, to demand clarification, you are creative. If you desire to work with color through sculpting, painting, or describing, you are creative. If you wish to discover alternatives to a particular problem, or cannot seem to receive the help you desire and develop your own methods, congratulations! You are creative. If you have a passion for life, art, imitation, even understanding death, well, you know what you are. If you are capable of loving, and have a willingness to share that emotion, or any emotion, you are most certainty creative. My point is that in twenty short years, I have found that one needs not have a knack for words to be creative. All you need to do is live, breathe, feel, and realize "it is such a simple thing to look beyond the immediate present." Winnifred Gies stated perfectly in her poem, the title of which slips my mind, "that all she really needed was simply just to be." I think THAT is what it means to be creative.

Free Entry: On My Favorite Word

My Favorite word is benevolent. I first noticed it, I believe, while reading my favorite book Everything is Illuminated. Maybe it is the fact that I found it in my favorite book that makes me partial to it. I think I might like it because it evokes the same feeling in me that the dictionary says it represents. It's positive, vibrant, not overused, or "sticky." It's versatile, clean, and looks pretty written in script. I tend to feel similar towards the word eudemon, meaning good or benevolent spirit. It takes something that is feared and morphs it into positive entity. I have found that most people have a favorite word. Sometimes two or three. A lot of people do not know they have a favorite, but use it all the time. Words fascinate me because of the way they can change and grow and transform over time. They are like people in that sense. Sometimes, a generation does not even realize that they have transformed a word. That interests me.

An Old Favorite

Angel's Destiny
I looked up to the sky
My wings were spread in the summer breeze
A halo of gold wrapped gently about my head
Each feather along my wing
Tells a warrior's great legacy

Banished from mortal villages
I search the sky
Looking for the one who's perfect for me
Questions run through my mind
My doubts of finding love grow each day
Will I find her or will I die?

Days have passed and I fall from the sky
Suddenly I find my self caught in a woman's arms
Her wings are radiant!
Full of beauty!
Our gazes lock as we fall into a kiss
This is the one for me
~Grunkle Bob~

This poem was created (forgive me if this is the work of someone else), by the boyfriend I had my freshman year of high school. Although he was sixteen when it was written, and I was little more than a girl, the words resonate deep within me to this day. I feel that it is "good" because it feels complete. It possesses a beginning, middle, and end, and it centers around a conflict while still including a resolution. The subject matter appears to stem from Greek literature. Although there are no hidden metaphors or meanings, the reader can still sense the speaker's urgency and fear in the first and second stanza, and feel the relief of the speaker in the third. The speaker must find his lover, who he has not yet met, or he will perish from existence. Love sustains him; nothing else can because he is obviously not human. He's not a god figure either, or he wouldn't have been sent away from "mortal villages." However, like a god, he knew his lover, one of his own kind, immediately. I often ask myself, who is he? Equally important, who is she? And why does it matter? I find the lack of rhyme and the present word order aesthetically pleasing. I'm thrilled to have an opportunity to share this piece with you all.