Poetry by Garren Small

I feel like reading poetry and hearing the poet read his own work are two completely different things. Hearing it the way it sounded when it was written is so telling of the underlying tale that sometimes gets lost behind words. It makes the poetry have so much feeling and makes it real and relatable. Mr. Small makes his readers/listeners become his characters and have those conversations with them.

I particularly enjoyed the conversation poem because I felt like he was writing about experiences that happen to thousands of people every day. As outsiders who had nothing to do with the writing of this story, we can point out what may have been going on in the background that even the writer didn’t notice simply because this is a universal human emotion and coping mechanism.

I really enjoyed one of his themes of how love requires some courage. His poems captured love in so many ways like love for a deceased family member, love for a child despite an internal conflict over something external of that person, and love for someone you hardly know or have never met. And these are things all humans go through. We all find love for other people and it doesn’t necessarily have to be for someone we are romantically involved with. On the topic of courage to find love, I think there are multiple dimensions to it. Often we are told that we will find love when we least expect it but for many people, this is hard to grasp. Love is not like grades, you cannot work to achieve it. It takes courage to stop looking for love and effectively give up trying and wait for it to come along itself. It’s hard to let fate guide you into the next stage of your life. As a very logical person, it’s been very hard for me to accept that I have no control over love. It’s taken years to accept that I have to stop looking and just wait. Staying in a relationship also takes courage. Love is tested every day. Some days are more trying than others but there have been countless stories of couples that have stayed together through sickness, distance, poverty and loss. It takes courage to move forward with someone and conquer life’s challenges. Sometimes it’s easier to overcome those challenges by yourself because you don’t have to worry about the upkeep of a relationship in the process but maybe staying with another person, while difficult, forces us to grow together and get through the challenges faster, knowing there is someone there to support us. 

The poem about the father and his daughter on a train almost made me cry. Although the father seemed distant and worried about something unrelated to his daughter, you could hear how much he loved and cared about her, even if his words didn’t express it. I guess it got to me because it reminded me of my father because of the way the daughter looks up to him so much and just wants to be around him all the time. It was a really beautiful way of expressing love between a father and daughter, which, in my opinion, can be the strongest bond a little girl will ever have and will search for a man who reminds her of what she loves about her father.