When I’m very lucky, I have both the time and the inclination to go back through personal notebooks and journals. This doesn’t happen very frequently, and it’s always enlightening, so I value greatly the opportunity to let my past self speak to the present me.
This particular time I was struck by how much poetry I’ve written. This type of writing goes back much longer than a decade, and it seems to be a frequent way that I approach recording and/or processing thoughts and feelings from a point of abstraction rather than one of reason or logic.
One of the dangers of art education, if it can be considered a danger, is that of learning the mechanics of things like balance, negative space, narrative structure, and other aspects of “how the sausage is made” regarding artistic forms. My multidisciplinary doctoral education in fine arts has given me the tools to peer straight through the curtain of many artistic forms and view them from the lens of a critic almost by default.
And then there’s poetry.
While I have certainly read poetry, it is mostly considered to be in the realm of pure paper-page stuff (i.e., literature) rather than the more performative or gallery-walled works that were within my program of study. Poetry is a thing apart.
This is perhaps a part of why I find myself writing poems: my mind never formally or deeply learned its rules, structures, or formalities. Thus, my brain finds in the poetic forms such freedom. I literally don’t know enough to critique myself (or, at least that’s what I tell myself). What I write seems poemish to me, so it is, and I’m unrestricted while writing it.
I liken this how I talk about bass guitar.
I do not play bass guitar. I have, however, been playing a standard 6-stringed guitar for more than 20 years at this point. It’s great fun. I’ve learned many songs and forgotten many others. I’ve played grunge, classical, jazz, country, indie, and so many other styles. I’ve noodled. I’ve written my own songs. I even know where most of the notes are and can reasonably play along with simple tracks without learning them first or having heard them before.
But when someone asks if I play bass guitar, I don’t say yes. I say that “I can probably hit the notes, but I don’t consider myself a bass player. That’s a whole different thing.”
Poetry is the bass guitar of writing for me. It uses the same words and the same sounds; it uses metaphors and other common language components just the same as a play script, an academic paper, or a monologue, but I respect it enough to consider it a wholly different thing. There’s just so much about it that I know I don’t know.
A few years ago, I asked my sister to critique a poem for me. She’s a pure-literature poem person who I know has the capacity to do this. Well, it’s now a few years later, and she still hasn’t provided a critique (at first she said I was in line behind a few other people, and now I’m next up, but, well, her throughput is incredibly slow. And yes, Mary, this is a public callout. (p.s. I love you, and I still want that critique.)
Waiting for a critique has been… annoying. The public library came to the rescue in the form of a newsletter where I saw that I’d missed a poetry night. The bio of the person who presented or read at that night indicated that there was a local poetry group that met twice a month: once for writing and once for critique. I had to go.
To date I’ve attended only the writing night. At first I had no idea how to find them so I sat at a table in the coffee shop and for almost the first time intentionally wrote a poem. I was near a huge window. There was a line of gently swaying drop lights descended from tall ceilings. The coffee was… okay. It got cold too quickly but the refills were free!
I ended up writing what I think is a poem about the complexity of human relationships with alternating sections that have strong imagery related to both the vastness of the universe and woodworking. It was also influenced by the lines and lights and windows. It seems to be also about the location of things and the points that connect them.
It is wholly unlike anything I’ve ever written before. I very much doubt that it’s “finished” in any formal sense (and I wouldn’t know what would make it so in the first place). I have literally no idea what feedback I will get when I bring it for critique or review or whatever, and I don’t even know what form that feedback might take. It’s all so very exciting.
It was also nice to be around what I’d describe as “word people” who legitimately try to search for the word that actually does what they want (both in meaning and phonetically) rather than something approximate (unless that’s what they’re going for). Didn’t know how much I’ve missed that recently until I was around it again.
I don’t have any strong point to conclude this write-up. I’m not really trying to make a point. It was just nice to get lost for a little bit in words like I used to. We’ll see what, if anything, comes of it.
Probably poems.
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