Ask Again Why Poetry Matters
My back is in a vice, my hips sting, my head is pulsating from the high and lack of adequate hydration, and I've got no business writing this so late into the night; that's how you know I'm bleeding out on the keys right now. Hear me out, because I can't only have this conversation in my head.
I was out walking thinking about the damn thing they all tell you is good marketing principles - figure out what you want to do, why you want to do it, and who you want to do it with. Find your target audience, find your "why". To have a growing collective that will stick with you, find what resonates with you, in the most coherent way you can put it, and consider how that might be communicated in your service offerings. I want to dig myself into a hole just thinking about it, but at some point if you can't beat the tired and true, you might as well join in. I don’t know how many times I'll have to go over it in my head, but I'll keep doing it until I get to the core, scorching and dense under the weight of carrying what I most love.
It' simple, really, when I stop bringing so much hard into it.
I want need to write. Poetry, mostly. I need to write poetry to the best of my ability. I need to work with other writers who also want to write poetry to the best of their ability. I need to work with people who want to write more confidently, more truthfully, more limitlessly, scoring the smell and color of their heart into the paper and feeling right in their bones (at least for a day or two, until they have to do it again) - not so others can praise them, but so they can rest knowing they are doing what is written. I don't want to be in service to the cute, light stuff - that prose is needed too no doubt, a reprieve from the stuff that makes you clutch your chest and say, "Ooooooof", silent in the aftermath. But I'm calling forth the writer in me and those out there who want at least some of their work to hit 'em where it's the realest. We need poetry because of what it works in this cultural moment when done well. So how do we, day in and day out, reach as deep as we can into our singularity and pull out the deepest commonalities that bind? And bind they must, for we've a world to mend.
About 4 years ago, I started to journal. I was never pulled to other formats/styles; writing was just the natural mode of expression that I made myself with, day after day. Some people's native tongue is dance, for others it's drawing, others yet it's carpentry - to each their own. I wrote to be kinder to myself and try to understand why it'd been so hard to be kind at all up to that point. I wrote to understand the world and myself better in it, or at least develop faith in a world I'd yet to see, and even dare to imagine a different one. I wrote to feel into the less-oiled joints, the creaky hinges, the deep fissures marking the landscape of adolescence and childhood. I know now that through journaling, I was developing a poetic perspective to my experiencing the world at large; a capacity to be present and interactive with more of what was right there, and in doing so, allowing me to smoothen the dialogue between all the withered and overactive parts alike, that they may have a shot at living together with others' parts in peace. Journaling lent itself well to poetry, because at some point that format just started to emerge; the structure came naturally as I re-sensitized to everything I'd retreated from. The words seemed to want to arrange themselves in neat short rows, framed by a captivating image or observation. I don’t know how I determined the point at which one transformed into the other - maybe it was the first time I wrote a phrase and entered a new line, sentence unfinished but left feeling just right; maybe it was when I intentionally rode a metaphor into another dimension, and allowed myself to play in that magic field for a while because it afforded more truth than when I stuck to the realistic. My poetry was knobby and overzealous, stickered with platitudes and buzzwords, but it was a process orientated toward something good, something important. I was SO excited to have a contained thing to show for the artistic side of me that was chronically under-expressed. Something came alive in me that I had missed, last seen around the time I left Romanian art school for the equalizing dull of your average North American elementary school. I kept journaling to fuel the emerging form and surrendered to the gifts as they'd come randomly. Over time, I noticed my poems were more like a beautified repackaging of the journal entries rather than a fresh catch. I was writing in phrases, truncated line by line, more imagistic and metaphorical than my journal entries, but the feeling of reading back my poems was as though I was suspended on a glass ceiling, watching an experience unfold from on high. There was limited expression of the felt sense and the relevance of the observations to any broader context; I couldn't yet write in a way that felt how my body knew was true, how it learned to feel - openly, as much as it can bear, courageously. As far as they'd come from my sparse adolescence, the poetics in my poetry were clunky.
At this point, I was fully invested in the craft of poetry - I even quit my paying, consistent job to make time for servitude to the word. I drank all the KoolAid. So when I noticed the frigidity, distance, boxiness, and safety of my writing, I turned to education on form and structure to help me uncover the full potential of what the inadvertent cultivation of a poetic sensibility had laid at my foundation - the surrendered presence to and expression of what is burning alive. And that's where you find me now, a day away from having applied to the Humber Program of Creative Writing, where in a year-long mentorship with an experienced poet learning the technique of the craft, I will write my first collection of REAL POETRY (jks, pls don't bamboozle yourself into thinking your poetry isn't real just because another poet hasn’t given it the stamp of approval). There's also writing workshops, courses, and informal mentorships lined up in the coming months so I can allow the understanding of the structure and form to bloom the senses.
As a writer who wants to weave melody into their work (prove, verse, or otherwise), you can't rely only on structural-functional education and expertise. No matter how crafty your vocabulary, how well executed your metrics are, how evocative your imagery is, it will not be that alone which ensures your writing reaches off the page and takes the pulse of the reader. To wax poetic for what matters - to heat up the frigid cultural body - you need to get on the level of your soles, palms, and underbelly, kneading the felt sense of the embodied at the level of precise articulation for revolution; being able to venture so deeply within, not just through the labyrinth of the mind, but the vessels pumping creative energy from the sacred and formless, to our expressed. This requires the development of a sensitivity to the abundance of experience, welcoming everything that comes, weaving between narrow and wide channels of stimuli, being able to sit with what's emerging and trusting the path it carves, while also discerning which threads pattern well together in each moment.
A poetic sensibility relies on realizing what we most give a shit about - it's writing how we are, really, not just what we see. I could write a verse about walking on this dirt road, reflecting on its color, and draw a parallel between its tan and the one I'll have after another 2 months of walking up and down that road. Simple, easy stretch; it's making an observation for the sake of it, it's grabbing your attention as if it's going to say something important, dressing up for your easy consumption, and offering it as a rare gem to be savored. In reality, it's doing the same thing Instagram aims to do - keep your attention on what doesn’t matter to distract from what needs to be said to heal our hearts. Better poetry (which is accessible for everyone whose core oscillates in rhythm with the word "poet"), the kind that can breathe with the years, that contains the signature of expansion and contraction, demands that we say what we must to regain our footing. I'm walking on that same tan road, but now I'm feeling how free I am to consume its distance, the openness of the dialogue that's made possible within myself as I walk. I notice the gratitude at getting clarity on my fuel and direction, how the road opens me to a future where the most potent conversations I have are no longer just inside my head, but with others in the collective sharing a love, easing a divide that feels at times impossible to breach right now. That's an entirely different poem; one that strives to engage in a group conversation with the observer inside my head, the parts of me feeling seen, the present me, the future me I'm presently crafting, the cultural labor and the possibilities for a collective better we could craft, and more. I know that without having first addressed my hyper-intellectualizing conditioning, my profound sense of disconnection, my lack of tolerance for the shape, size, and patterns of my organism in space, my rigidity in new relational playgrounds…. I'd be miles away from where I am now as a writer. And I still have a far ways to go - as I sober this body's oblique knowings with an education of poetics, the tides will eventually shift to a need for re-focusing on the work of embodiment to get closer to the formless, and so on and so forth. A dedication to the mutual reinforcement of these domains over time will ensure that we write what must be processed for all; what matters most, spoken from the heart for the heart, so we may bear the work ahead of us.
May we only catch our breath on poetry that echoes like elevator music in a mall, as we fight relentlessly to whet verse into a cultural tool that destroys and remakes a world bleeding out.
