[2021-03-21] Poetry
Today, a friend sent me an inspiring quote by Robert Frost:
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found its words.
It is such a simple notion, suggesting that anyone can write poetry, if only they are willing to tap into their emotion, find the related thought, and express that thought in words.
I've never thought that I was good at writing poetry. The poems I composed as a kid were simple verses, along the lines of "roses are red." When I was in high school, I once again tried my hand at poetry, even sending some of my poems to a published poet who was a friend of my English teacher. Recalling that, I dug out the letter the poet had sent to me in August 1984, along with the poems I had shared with him. It began:
Dear Jennifer, Thanks for your poems. Just what I needed, since I don't have enough to keep me busy.
Not a promising start. The letter never really got better from that unfriendly opening. While the poet made some effort to point out the virtues of my writing, he inevitably followed such statements with a but, effectively nullifying everything he had said before the but. For example, he wrote:
Reading over these poems, I think your largest virtue is clarity, good English, an easiness to understand. And don't despise that because it's very rare. But even such an obvious virtue is liable to make any weakness more obvious.
He then proceeded to lay out said weaknesses, using such words as trivial, simply wrong and self-pity. He concluded his letter this way:
However: the clarity of your poems is rare and valuable. It reminds me of Sitwell saying she thought when a poem was read aloud that the reader's voice should be like a clear glass. But clear glass reveals flaws as well as merit.
The effect of his criticism, even if founded, was to make me conclude that I wasn't a poet and never would be. His comments didn't motivate me to want to apply his critique in improving my poetry. And I'm not a shrinking violet. Just a month after receiving the poet's letter, I started a four-year program in journalism, where harsh, unvarnished critiques were the norm. In the latter case, however, I took the feedback and used it to make my writing better. In the former case, I took the poet's response as definitive, and I never wrote poetry again.
I wish that I had read Barbara Ueland's If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit before sending my poems to the poet. Ueland asserts that "Everybody is talented because everybody has something to express." But we forget this or never learn it in the first place because of all the critics. She points out:
Then we go to school and then comes on the great Army of school teachers with their critical pencils, and parents and older brothers (the greatest sneerers of all) and cantankerous friends, and finally that Great Murderer of the Imagination—a world of uncaring, unkind, dinky, prissy Criticalness.
Ueland suggests that we carefully choose the people with whom we share our writing—indeed, any form of art we produce:
The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is: "Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out."
Had my teacher's poet friend said, "whatever you take from my critiques, don't stop writing poems," the outcome of my exchange with him might have been very different. In contrast, Ueland writes:
I tell you all this because it is the way you are to feel when you are writing—happy, truthful and free, with that wonderful contented absorption of a child stringing beads in kindergarten. With complete self-trust. Because you are a human being all you have to do is get out truthfully what is in you and it will be interesting, it will be good. Salable? I don't know. But that is not the thing to think of—for a long time anyway.
I love her metaphor of a child stringing beads in kindergarten. That immediately conjures up for me an image of a kid who is cheerful and confident—oblivious to the "right way" to string beads, as if there were such a thing.
At the same time, Ueland provides some realism: our writing might not be salable. Even so, we should not stop writing since that's the only way to get better at our craft and to eventually produce something that could be sold.
Since 1984, I've written millions of words in news stories, essays, reports, memos, communiqués, journal entries and blog posts, but no poems. Had I known, as Frost states, that "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found its words," I might have spent the past 35 years penning poems in addition to all my other writing. We've been taught that writing is special, says Ueland, when it's really "just talking on paper."
Continuous writing is the only way to silence not just the external critics but the internal ones as well. Ueland recommends:
When discouraged, remember what Van Gogh said: "If you hear a voice within you saying: You are no painter, then paint by all means, lad, and that voice will be silenced, but only by working."
Explore your emotions. Analyze your thoughts. Write your words or produce the content—paintings, photos, music—that allows you to find and express your voice and to silence the critics.
