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elabyI've long had a love affair with poetry. From the moment my mother read me The Hobbit, I was awestruck by the way meter and rhyme can twine together to create this lyrical, evocative thing, like the lovechild of music and prose. For years, I held onto the notion (snob that I was, and still sadly have the capacity to be) that poetry could only be that which has both meter and rhyme. In high school, I was enamored with Edgar Allen Poe, particularly his most musical and metrically perfect poems like "Ulalume" and "Bridal Ballad". In college, I took numerous courses on the Romantics, treasuring especially the storytelling poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads. I came to recognize that poems that didn't rhyme were sometimes even more complexly meaningful than ones that simply sounded beautiful. However, I rejected my professors' assertion – and still do – that a poem that portrays complex ideas necessarily has more value than a simpler poem constructed for the purpose of pleasing the ears.
A few years ago, a friend of mine recommended a poet named Amy Lowell. Lowell was a nature-reverent woman who loved women, writing in the early 20th century. I borrowed a book of her poetry from the library and started to page through it. There was no meter, no rhymes.
And I fell head-over-heels.
I look back with embarrassment on my former belief – if only privately proclaimed – that the only poetry worth reading was that perfectly constructed, metrical rhyming sort. Poetry doesn't need these things to be beautiful, to be valuable, to be a worthwhile pursuit either in reading or writing it. The flexibility of poetry seems uniquely freeing to me: in writing prose stories, I still believe that there are certain elements that must be executed with skill in order for the writing to be high-quality. With poetry, though, anything goes. Even the accepted rules of punctuation and capitalization, which I would never purposefully violate in prose writing, can be stretched or completely ignored when writing poetry. As someone who is frequently paralyzed by self-imposed standards of quality when writing prose, poetry is a delectable escape.
Because of my depression, I had written practically nothing since winter. In May, after the Fairie Festival, I came home and the world was blooming. There was so much beauty, now more easily visible to me with the help of medication and therapy. I had been deeply longing for quite some time for a way to express my adoration and appreciation of nature, but writing stories felt exhausting and pressured, and my attempts at botanical drawing fell short of my standards. As much as I've loved reading poetry, I've very rarely written any, and my prior attempts at perfect meter and rhyme were too constricting for sustained enjoyment.
One day in May I took my notebook and I went out into our yard. I sat down beneath our maple tree, in the grass amongst the clover and phlox and bluets, and I wrote a poem. And then another. They had no meter and no rhyme, just the natural flow with which the words slipped onto the page. Without the goal of writing a certain number of words or setting up a coherent story, and without the confines of meter and rhyme, I could focus on choosing one perfect word after another. Refining the final draft, tweaking each sentence so that it reflects precisely what I mean, has always been my favorite part of writing. When I write poetry, I can do that from the start.
My notebook is slowly filling up with poems. I don't feel pressure to excel when I write them, just the desire to reflect what inspires me. It occurs to me that this is what art is all about, but for so long that's gotten lost in my expectations and yearnings and "I should"s. Predictably, it's helped me write prose again, too. Rachel and I are writing together in the carefree way we used to when we were in college. It's blissful.
A few years ago, a friend of mine recommended a poet named Amy Lowell. Lowell was a nature-reverent woman who loved women, writing in the early 20th century. I borrowed a book of her poetry from the library and started to page through it. There was no meter, no rhymes.
And I fell head-over-heels.
I look back with embarrassment on my former belief – if only privately proclaimed – that the only poetry worth reading was that perfectly constructed, metrical rhyming sort. Poetry doesn't need these things to be beautiful, to be valuable, to be a worthwhile pursuit either in reading or writing it. The flexibility of poetry seems uniquely freeing to me: in writing prose stories, I still believe that there are certain elements that must be executed with skill in order for the writing to be high-quality. With poetry, though, anything goes. Even the accepted rules of punctuation and capitalization, which I would never purposefully violate in prose writing, can be stretched or completely ignored when writing poetry. As someone who is frequently paralyzed by self-imposed standards of quality when writing prose, poetry is a delectable escape.
Because of my depression, I had written practically nothing since winter. In May, after the Fairie Festival, I came home and the world was blooming. There was so much beauty, now more easily visible to me with the help of medication and therapy. I had been deeply longing for quite some time for a way to express my adoration and appreciation of nature, but writing stories felt exhausting and pressured, and my attempts at botanical drawing fell short of my standards. As much as I've loved reading poetry, I've very rarely written any, and my prior attempts at perfect meter and rhyme were too constricting for sustained enjoyment.
One day in May I took my notebook and I went out into our yard. I sat down beneath our maple tree, in the grass amongst the clover and phlox and bluets, and I wrote a poem. And then another. They had no meter and no rhyme, just the natural flow with which the words slipped onto the page. Without the goal of writing a certain number of words or setting up a coherent story, and without the confines of meter and rhyme, I could focus on choosing one perfect word after another. Refining the final draft, tweaking each sentence so that it reflects precisely what I mean, has always been my favorite part of writing. When I write poetry, I can do that from the start.
My notebook is slowly filling up with poems. I don't feel pressure to excel when I write them, just the desire to reflect what inspires me. It occurs to me that this is what art is all about, but for so long that's gotten lost in my expectations and yearnings and "I should"s. Predictably, it's helped me write prose again, too. Rachel and I are writing together in the carefree way we used to when we were in college. It's blissful.
