Thoughts on poetry

I’ve always had an uncertain relationship with poetry. Reading poetry has never been very appealing to me. I occasionally catch a spark of interest in a certain poet, but even so, I just find reading poetry to be a bit of a slog. But for all my difficulty reading it, I find myself continually drawn to write poetry.

As a reader, I am drawn to the labyrinthine turns of fiction. Fiction is the intersection of the voyeuristic and the vicarious, a place where I can both observe and experience, where I can look in on one world while living in another. The author maps the environment, but I choose which streets I walk down when I overlay my own experience.

As a writer, poetry represents an odd set of contradictions. It is structured and ephemeral, meandering and focused, strict and inconsistent. That is, it is like my mind. Writing poetry is like a conversation with myself; I am permitted ambiguity and uncertainty because the unsaid is understood. I don’t need to flesh out narrative details with words; every gap, skip or stutter is balanced by an emotional and spiritual foundation that exists inside of me.

That, I think, is what makes poetry so powerful (perhaps an odd thing for someone who doesn’t read poetry to say). Even tightly wound poetry leaves sufficient room for the reader to slip through. I can impose my own narrative because I can see myself in the structure of the poem.

Andrew Sullivan highlights an article about poetry and sadness. “Poetry has that strange way of reflecting every sad inch of you,” writes Michael Berger. I think the post leans too heavily on how poetry helps us deal with sadness at the expense of its ability to express pure joy. But still, he has a great point. Poetry reflects the nuances of our emotions in a unique way, and I think that is because it reflects the nuances of our minds. Our thoughts aren’t always structured in the same way, nor are they subject to the hobgoblin of consistency. Thoughts swell and flex, burst and collapse in on themselves, they sprint and heave. For all their unpredictability, thoughts possess an internal consistency that gives them purpose; they exist, and that alone is sufficient.