A Poet's Rocky History with Poetry

Poetry is allowed to be so many things. It's allowed to be long; it's allowed to be short. It's allowed to have no capitalization or punctuation; it's allowed to have too much punctuation (we love an Emily Dickinson moment). Consequently, everyone thinks they can write it, and whether or not that's true is of course debatable. I do my best.

Throughout history, poetry has been especially "trendy," and we all have our personal favorite eras. When I first began reading it in middle school, I was drawn to older material - Poe, in particular. It was reflected in my own writing at that time: I was pumping out one cringy goth poem a day for about three years. It all sounded more like song lyrics, and not all song lyrics are truly poetry. Everything I wrote rhymed, and like many lyricists, I developed an excellent ear for half-rhymes. But the biggest problem of all was that I used poetry to simply write down my feelings exactly as I experienced them, with perhaps some melodrama added. That doesn't exactly make for good poetry. I figured this out fairly quickly considering I was just a kid, and that's why I barely wrote any poetry in high school.

Ever since college, I have instead fallen for modernism - the Sylvia Plath kind. Not necessarily today's kind. At the moment, I'm not particularly drawn to most literary or "pop"/Instagram poetry, and I think it shows in my own poetry. I also hold the unpopular opinion that a poem is usually no more interesting than its subject matter. No offense to Keats, but nothing he has to say about the Grecian urn will make me believe it's interesting. These experiences where I was reading more and more poetry refined my tastes and helped me understand what I'd like to accomplish by writing poetry, if I were to write more of it again.

The turning point came in junior year with my advanced poetry class. I was always such a voiceless poet, mimicking whoever I loved most at any given time, blabbing about my feelings. But something clicked in that class; I found my voice. I had the freedom to experiment and write about anything I wanted, in damn near whatever way I wanted. We worked in a big peer review circles, which resulted in a ton of valuable feedback. After all my attempts, this was the first time I truly learned to write poems. The first poem I composed in my upcoming collection The Poet's Tarot, "Queen of Wands," was written for that class. I realized what types of poems I wanted to create (poems about subjects that actually interest me, like tarot, the stars, existence) and I had a much better eye for how to realize each vision well. My professor was the one to tell me I should make an entire tarot collection. I didn't think I'd be able to accomplish such a thing, but I did.

The only hitch is, now that I have my voice and my style, it doesn't fall easily into either the literary or mainstream/Instagram poetry categories of today. Even though I'm finally at a place where I truly value the work I'm producing, I'm never confident that others will enjoy it. In fact, my poems get less attention than any other content I post on Instagram, despite using a ton of writing/poetry tags. I suppose that's fair: I don't care for most of the content there anyway, thus emphasizing the disconnect I feel from online poetry communities. I don't relate to others, and they don't relate to me. Sounds angsty, doesn't it? It's true though. I feel as though by rarely fangirling over other indie/up-and-coming poets that I've almost accumulated bad karma. I have no idea how well The Poet's Tarot will sell, or if I'll see the point in self-publishing more poetry collections. But I'm going to try.