Why I Don't Write Poetry

I mentioned in The Order of Things that I don't much like poetry.

Since that day, just last month, Adrienne Rich passed away. I was sorry to hear that she had passed; she's a poet whose work I really like. She had a lot of impact on a lot of lives, and was willing to be a strong women when others would not or could not. I don't know anything about her politics; I only know some of her poems. And they are very good.

But, poetry. I don't much write poetry either. I wrote a couple of poems in college,  and they are very much college poems. Not because they're about drinking or frats or what have you, but because of the quality of writing. Little that I wrote in college may see the light of day in its college form; I'm not sure if any of it hasn't been re-edited at this point, if not entirely rewritten.

I can be casual with my words. I can be braggy in conversation, using words I know that perhaps others won't. I like feeling smart. Sorry.

With poetry, though, every word matters. Syllables and sentences run into each other and away with each other, and with good poetry, poetry that I like that that others have published, and that I'm happy has seen the light of day, that poetry has layers of meaning. There are the words. Then there are the references they're making. Then there is the new thing that they all make together. Then there is the place you take those things, and make it something new for you.

I don't write poems like that. Can I? Maybe. It would be very hard, and undoubtedly worth it, but words of such weight aren't how my stories tend to speak to me. Not that fiction is "easy" either, but it's not as hard. Easy and hard aren't even the words I mean, they're layman's translations for gut feelings and visceral reactions. Poetry is evocative of different things for me than fiction, a different place in my brain where Ginsberg smokes (did Ginsberg smoke?) and Eliot prays (preys?) and Anne Sexton is more than a little mad (crazy, that is, not angry).

The starting line of a poem is like a reverse fishing lure: it bobs on the surface, waiting for you to strike and catch yourself, and then it pulls you down with it.

"Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The Muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedius argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question....
Oh, do not ask "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit."

~The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T. S. Eliot

Literary tattoos

I don't have any tattoos. Yet.

I've seen quite a lot of bad tattoos. Quite a lot of good ones. I like looking online at various pages listing them. I don't want a tattoo that somebody else has. I want a tattoo for me, that's mine. I haven't settled on a design yet that I love for long enough to actually go through with it.

Then, I saw a post on Neil Gaiman's blog: literary tattoos. Is there a reason I hadn't thought of this before? I hadn't seen one before, anyway. So, duh. Of course getting a quote would make fantastic sense. Of course, now the problem is what quote? Contrariwise.org is (or rather, was...they haven't updated in a year or more) a blog of literary tattoos. It's cool to see the ink people have gotten, and the quotes people have gotten. It's amazing how many Kurt Vonnegut "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" tattoos you'll see, with web search. How many The Giving Tree tattoos. The Lorax. Shakespeare, of course, and while I dearly love the Bard, none of his words are my words.

In The Order of Things I talked about my poetry preferences, citing Adrienne Rich specifically. A poem of hers, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, has great imagery and a few really good lines in it, notably, "A thinking woman sleeps with monsters".  I'd just heard of a website, StrayTats.com, where you can create a fake tattoo (or multiples), and decided I'd try it out.

In the end, forearm is not the place for that tattoo for me. But, I still really like the quote.

Really, anything from Ginsberg's "Howl" would be lovely; also, too long. Just "Howl" from the cover of the collection wouldn't be bad, but a single word is too easily misconstrued. I don't want it to be looked at as though I'm wearing a wolf t-shirt, after all.

Maybe one day, when I have something published, I'll pick a phrase or word from that, so that it is mine. But for now, I'm still looking. Or, still rowing, if I want to quote Anne Sexton, and frequently I do.

The Order of Things

I'm not a big fan of poetry. 

That is to say, poetry has to be particularly fine to draw me in. I like Allen Ginsberg's "Howl". I like T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land. I like Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus". I guess what I'm getting at here is that I like rather literary, somewhat complex poetry, though I do have a New Jersey loyalty to William Carlos Williams and, of course, Bruce Springsteen (so he sings his poems. They're poems. That are stories. More on this another time.) Poems tell stories in fewer words and fewer pages, poets loading all the power that they can into each phrase, and every chosen word, and there's a certain magic in that.