We live in a world of increasing specialization. Just about every little things has an entire field of knowledge dedicated to it, and each of those little fields has its own vocabulary.

Science uses a whole lot of Latin, psychology uses the word affect in a very strange way, and unless you happen to be a carpenter (or blacksmith) there are a million types of hammers you wouldn’t know the name for. Within poetry we use our own jargon referring to rhyme schemes and forms and tropes and all that.

The problem with all this specialized vocabulary is that the people who don’t know it have no idea what you’re talking about (and this is why most people don’t talk to me about computers) and just nod their heads politely. There is a prompt in here, really.

We’re also in National Poetry Month here in the U.S. (as if any of the read write poem readers would have missed that). I think there is a bit of a tendency to write our poems as if our poems were all in some other world, kinda similar to this one, but distinct. This is not a thing that’s a good thing or a bad thing, it just is.

But this month, I think it would be interesting to root our poems in the worlds we inhabit on a daily basis, and write a poem using the jargon of a specialized area. For the professional poets, we’ll know what you’re talking about, but if we have any structural engineers … the trick will be to use the vocabulary we deal with every day in generally not very poetic environments and make it meaningful to the readers of our poems, even if they have no idea what DHCP tables or eurocodes are.

~Tom.