As I write about my journey to poetry, I want to note that I have never considered myself a Poet. I've started writing poetry over the past year, and it's still pretty rough. I want to write about poetry because I think that there's a number of people who don't like poetry, who could actually enjoy poetry. I plan to spend the next few blog entries writing about poetry, but I want to start off first and foremost with writing about my own journey to poetry.
Throughout middle school, high school, and my undergraduate career, I hated poetry. Every class I took where I studied poetry, I felt like poetry was inaccessible, unless you had a teacher unpack it for you. Whenever I tried to write poetry, I felt like I couldn't write poetry because there were too many rules about what makes a poem. I also hated the fact that there wasn't enough space in poetry to write the kinds of stories that I wanted to write.
I started writing lyric nonfiction midway through my undergraduate career. Lyric nonfiction is a space between linear storytelling and poetry. Lyric moves through association and imagery, which is a strong tool for poetry. Still, while I was writing lyric nonfiction, I still avoided poetry.
As I started graduate school, I decided that I wanted to write a thesis that centered around May Swenson, a famous queer poet from my own home town. This required that I read May Swenson's poetry and take a May Swenson focused class during the first year of my graduate program. While I don't love everything that May Swenson's work, there were a few poems that I discovered that I loved. First was her poem "How Everything Happens," then I discovered "Body My House." Both poems were accessible, and both rang true in the way that poetry does, as poets make observations about the way that the world is.
In the summer between my my first and second year of graduate school, I was able to attend a writing program in Prague with a poet friend in my program. My friend brought a stack of poetry collections that I read my way through in the month that we lived together in the Czech Republic. There was something enchanting and romantic about travelling Europe and reading poetry. I loved the feeling so much (again, I am basic) that I decided to start writing poetry while I was there, trying to take snapshots with my words as I explored the history surrounding me.
Not everyone gets the opportunity to travel to Prague with an extremely gifted poet, and I acknowledge that I was so lucky to have that experience. But the things I learned in Prague the importance of reading good poetry, and allowing yourself to get caught up in it. For a future post, I'll list out some of the most impactful poetry collections that I've read. I also learned that poetry can exist as an effort to explore things in brevity. There were sights in Prague that I couldn't imagine writing an entire essay about, but that I still wanted to capture with words. Poetry allowed for that space.
I am not a poet. I try to write a poem every morning in my journal. Some I am excited about, some are a mess. But I enjoy writing poetry. I've learned to enjoy reading poetry. I love the power of a poem to capture a singular question or a singular image.