Thoughts on Poetry for Poetry at Work Day

…a poem freshens the world. – Ted Kooser

The first story I wrote was about my grandmother who had fallen into a lake. My first poem, fittingly or disturbingly, used the same experience. The incident, something I knew and with which I was familiar, propelled me into the unknown. At first, it was the world of unknown letters and words – I wrote my first story when I was six or seven. The second was an unfamiliar world, but it turned out to be the world I needed.

Why that is, I’m not sure. I only know that fiction is not my natural world. I dread the idea of creating entire worlds and casts of believable characters. I worry about writing round characters and finding their motivations for the way they interact with the world, with each other, and with themselves. While I love reading, analyzing, and editing fiction, it is not a mode to which I often turn when I write creatively.

When I want to write creatively, I turn to poetry. Poetry is my world. Poetry introduces me to other ways of seeing the world, myself, and others. It frees me from fixed forms and rigid control and allows a wildness I don’t find many other places. Not only that, poetry frees me to write the stupid lines, the sentimental lines, the lines that just don’t come out right at first, and to be all right with that fact. When I write poetry, I am by myself. No one can see how inane the lines are unless I let them view them.

Poetry also lets me be still for a few minutes and to view things in miniature – as Blake would say to see a world in a grain of sand. In my poems, what matters most is not the seen story but the unseen one. What matters are the undercurrents, the part of the iceberg underneath the water, and the fixing of my gaze on colors, punctuation, breaks, objects, and the mysterious you who sometimes is me and sometimes is not, who sometimes is someone I love and sometimes is one who has wounded me deeply.

Poetry asks me to risk more and to risk still more every time I approach the page. It invites me to meet the other – the person who isn’t encumbered with perfectionism and worry but is lost in a love of language, rhythm, and elements on a page. Poetry lets me be my obsessive compulsive self but metamorphoses that self into something beneficial and sometimes even beautiful. It lets me turn and turn and turn an emotion or experience and find different facets of those two things in the turning. Poetry, for me, is a way of thinking, of seeing, of being, and perhaps that’s why it – and not fiction – is my world.