I was twelve before I discovered the love of writing. That’s not an especially novel age for discovery, but it did come as a bit of a shock. I was never much of a reader growing up. My comprehension was fine, not great, not outstanding. But my reading speed was slow. Still is. I would spend weeks or months with a simple novel, not hours or days like some of my friends.
Writing too, was painful. Literally painful.
I always held my pencil the wrong way, and try as I might, try as my parents might, I would always revert back to my incorrect, vice like grip. As if I were attempting to break the instrument in front of me, rather than allowing it to simply get out of the way of my imagination. I tried triangular molds for the front of the pencil or pen. I tried intentionally placing the pen in the correct grip before beginning. The finger placement would last exactly as long as I was thinking about it. But eventually you should start thinking about the words and the story, not the grip. And so I wrote, slowly and painfully and incorrectly.
More importantly, I never seemed to understand the construct of a story in the way many of my peers did. When I first discovered my love of writing, many of my peers were comfortably writing chapter stories with multiple characters and a central plot. It felt like looking at algebraic math equation you don’t understand (you know, the one with more letters than logically makes sense for a numeric problem). I could see that there was structure behind it all, but it just wasn’t accessible to me.
And then? Then I discovered poetry. And no high falutin pretentious poetry, either. My best friend gave me a collection of poems entitled,“A Light in the Attic” by Shel Silverstein.
Everything about Shel Silverstein was fun. I had no idea what I was holding at the time. What it might start within me. Silverstein felt like the spiritual successor to Dr. Suess. (I’m sure for many children, Silverstein and Suess are contemporaries, but I was amazingly unaware of Shel’s work until middle school). Like Suess, Silverstein was ridiculous, nonsensical, phonetic and playful. But occasionally touching on something much bigger than the simple rhyme at the surface. Both talked about racism, group think, and religion, but it was cleverly hid behind stanzas and made up words. And most importantly to me, Silverstein was accessible. Inviting, even.
In his poem, Invitation, Shel beckons to his audience to draw a little closer:
If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…
If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!
And so I did. I sat by Shel’s fire for a long while. I dreamed, I wished, I hoped, and I pretended. Here was someone I could emulate. Here was a poet that didn’t seem to take himself too seriously, whose language and stanza structure were simple. I started writing my own playful poems in the rhyming pattern of ABCB:
The stanza has a set of four.
The first and the third don’t rhyme.
The second and the fourth ones do.
You’ll have a poem in no time.
See? Not my best work, but it’s easy.
And that was enough. That was a math equation with no alphabet. That was the machinery, the structure getting out of the way. The medium that allowed the message. Any message in fact.
Writing about a crush on the girl that sits in front of you in english? That seemed the stuff of diaries, not literature. But as a set of stanzas? As a poem? In even such a simple rhyming format, my interest became playful, refined, and imminently palatable.
When we had to present a piece of writing in front of the class, most of my peers awkwardly stood up shaking, voices quivering, never making eye contact. They hurriedly read their stories in barely audible tones. Very few twelve year olds are good public speakers.
But when I had to present my work, a poem with cadence, and rhyme, I could feel the interest of my class. Poems gave me the format and permission to explore whatever I felt at the time. And a twelve year old feels a lot.
I became known for my poems. I don’t even think my poetry was especially insightful. But I was persistent. Each new crush, I wrote a poem (or seven) of unrequited love. I read the Poem “David”, and not liking it’s ending, wrote an alternate poem. I watched the movie “Murder in the First” and rhymed about the (imagined) experience of feeling hopeless and powerless in a jail cell. I tackled subjects as big as alcoholism and faith within those stanzas. I wrote year end presentations entirely in rhyme (which was neither required or encouraged, but met with middle school teacher shrugs).
Other people called me a poet, and I liked the identity. It’s not such a bad label for your ego if you tend to be a bit more introspective and emotional. But I always felt a disconnect with other, non rhyming poets.
I could fiddle with the structure of my poems, change around the ABCB for an ABBA (or some other combination of letters) but they always rhymed. The truth is, I didn’t understand most non rhyming poetry (which to state the absolutely obvious, is almost all poetry). When we studied them in class, I was once again lost. Not necessarily on the content, but why they were written as poems in the first place. When classmates would excitedly expect to find a poetic peer, they would hand me their non punctuated lines of seemingly random sentences, and I would smile, and thank them for sharing, and internally vow to never write a non rhyming poem.
Some non rhyming poetry focused on structure, and while I didn’t love the format, I at least understood it:
Never wrote haiku
Much as I knew it’s structure
They would rarely rhyme.
But non structured, non rhyming poems? What the hell were they? They seemed the literary equivalent to a Jackson Pollock painting. “Give enough monkeys a typewriter”, I thought, “and eventually they’ll produce a poem”.
Looking back now, I think I was afraid. I had claimed the title of poet gladly, and here were others, alike and yet not alike. Familiar and yet foreign.Threatening my identity. I doubled down on my own particular poetic preference. Like so many things I didn’t understand, I held the inaccessible with disdain. If a poem could be anything, rhyming, not rhyming, plain or ambiguous, then anyone can write a poem, I thought.
Turns out, I was right.
Anyone can write a poem. From twelve year old Matt, to the celebrated and revered poets we study in our schools, to the unknown writer of the limerick within a dollar store birthday card. All poets.
But that doesn’t seem right, does it? It doesn’t seem right to lump in my ever rhyming middle school poetry with the works of Mary Oliver, or John Keats, or even Shel Silverstein. Neither does it seem right to include that mass produced, overly sentimentalized birthday card (to no one in particular) in the great and mystical category of poetry.
What I’m really asking (both then and now), is what sets poetry apart from mere rhyme or random pairings of words or sentences.What is the work of the poet?
The truth is, I didn’t have a good definition of what poetry was for years. And for years that lack of definition never bothered me. I wrote prolifically through middle school, high school and into my early twenties. And then I stopped.
Why I stopped has always been a matter of curiosity. My wife asks me suspiciously why there is so much poetry for ex-girlfriends, but next to none for her. I’ve joked that there’s not enough sorrow or heartbreak in our relationship to drive me back to the page/ keyboard.
But certainly there has been heartbreak outside of our marriage. I have lost friends, lost faith, lost children, lost which direction is up. These would certainly outweigh the impetus of my seventh grade heartache. Where are those poems?
Maybe the world appears less simple, or I am reluctant to simplify something as complex as those losses into a few simple stanzas. Maybe the only poetry I’ve ever known how to write is inadequate for such love, and loss, and anger, and even resolution.Ultimately, I think I stopped writing poems because I stopped believing I was a poet.
We all can fall victim to imposter syndrome from time to time, when we feel unworthy for the identities we have already received and claimed. Nothing brings this to the forefront quicker than realizing how little you understand something you are passionate about. I stopped believing I was a poet because my view of poetry was too small. I had not done the work of understanding what poetry was. I had been practicing a very specific ‘what’, and’ how’, but had never understood the ‘why’.
And a focus on the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ are especially unhelpful when it comes to poetry. Think about what poetry is for a second. Rhyming? Doesn’t have to. A certain rhythm? Not necessarily. Distinguishable sentence and punctuation structure? Actually, poetry gets a pass on that as well. It seems that the one distinguishing trait that a poem must possess, is that it is not prose. That’s a strange way to define something; by what it’s not.
Now, there may be an agreed upon rules for poetry that I don’t know about. I’m not an English major. But that’s the ‘how’ again. Coutless poets and readers have asked what makes a poem a poem, and have come to only partial agreement. And when you ask the question, “what is poetry”, you’re really asking, “why is this a poem, and not anything else?”. I love the question, and I love each attempt at the answer. Even if each answer proves inadequate.
Some of our greatest words have no adequate definition. Love, Art, Divinity, Poetry. The unnamable becomes ever polyonamous, having many names. This is why Love is a feeling, but not just a feeling. It’s commitment, but not just commitment. Joy, but not just joy. If love exists at all, it is not merely any of these things. But it might include all of them. We keep throwing these words at it, and all of them are inadequate. But we have to keep trying. Put another name on it. Turn the gem and see it from another angle.
A few years back a piece of poetry caught me off guard. It was less than a page in length (with a good deal of white space in between stanzas and sentences). The words that it used were pedestrian. But it spoke to a great paradox inside of me. A paradox that many have grappled with and written volumes about. And yet it spoke far more directly and truthfully than anything else I had read on the subject. That was a poem by David Whyte, who suggests that “poetry is that to which we have no defense”. I have found this to be a very good metric. Whether it is from Whyte, Oliver, Rilke, Silverstein or Suess, each has whispered in my ear something beautiful, something true, and something to which I have no defense.
That poem, and it’s revelation, was another invitation. Just like Shel Silverstein’s in grade 12. An invitation back into a world of poetry. To come sit by it’s fire again. Back into a genre that is entirely different than the novel, the interview, the short story. This time I huddled around the fire much more humbly. Not as an imitator or pretender, but as someone beginning to understand the ‘why’ for the first time. It is enough.
Each poem is gamble, of course. Will this poem be open to me? Will I understand it? Will it speak to me? Will it reveal something? Will I be defenceless against its revelation? Some poems remain shrouded. Some skim the surface. And some undo me.
And then just the other day, I sat at my computer and wrote. I found myself writing something that was not a post, not a short story, not a chapter in some far off unreleased book. It was profoundly honest, and therefore beautiful. It came from a place I am only vaguely aware of, either deep within, or even outside of myself. Something less crafted by me, and more gifted to me. Something to which I had no defence.
“A poet, after all”, I thought, smiling and wiping the tears from my eyes.
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