I’m Still Not Entirely Sure What a “Poem” Is
I think there might be people out there who think I’m a poet, and I think it’s terrifying. I haven’t been a poet since my middle school days of writing rhyming couplets about hating school and my early high school days of writing terrible prose with line breaks. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure the main reason I wrote so many poems in grade nine was because my teacher seemed to have no idea how to grade poems but very strong opinions about fiction, and I felt like I was terrible at writing fiction and wanted a shot at a decent grade. Man, high school was such a great time.
I’m still trying to figure out what a poem is and coming up short. I think I have this crisis every time I try to write a poem. Two years ago I took a poetry workshop and it drove me insane. It was a spoken word class, so it was slightly less terrifying, but I definitely feel like I spent most of the class writing prose and trying to pass it off as poetry. I remember that one or two of the “poems” I included in my end-of-course chapbook were, quite literally, prose with line breaks. I keep taking these writing workshops in other genres to “broaden my horizons” and coming out of them with more questions than answers.
I quit writing poems in grade ten for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I felt like the people I was interacting with had a very rigid view of poetry and I didn’t feel like I was allowed to experiment. I didn’t feel like what I was interested in writing was anything my teacher was willing to consider a “poem”, let alone a good one. I had so many classmates who wrote poems and I didn’t understand how they did it or where they were coming from or where the choices they made came from. At the time, I mostly wanted to be playful. The only poems I’ve ever really understood were written for children. I’m not sure how to write a poem that takes itself very seriously.
Poetry feels so insular to me. I feel like so many poets primarily read other poets and write for other poets. I like reading poetry collections sometimes, but it’s super hit or miss and I think there are a lot more poetry collections I’ve actively disliked than poetry collections I’ve loved. At its heart, I find most poetry too inaccessible. Maybe it’s my lack of formal education in English literature, who knows, or maybe it’s an issue of not quite vibing with the reigning ethos. I like poems that are playful and unserious, or poems that do interesting things with structure, or poems that capture interesting concepts in new ways, but I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it is that turns me off of so many poems. Like, yes, I love beautiful language, but beautiful language isn’t enough. Maybe I don’t go to enough readings, I don’t know – maybe that would change my mind on the topic. But in any case, I’m not sure whether the current “poetry meta” (please don’t ask me to define that) is a language I’m actually interested in speaking. (And I know I’m overgeneralizing here, but screw it, these are my thoughts.)
About a year ago I made a tongue-in-cheek comment about how I write CNF because I’m bad at poetry and bad at fiction. And this is true, to some extent – I generally think my attempts at writing poems and short stories are utterly disastrous – but I also like the essay as a form because I feel like it has no rules. I can write in a very casual and straightforward tone, like in this paragraph, or I can adopt a fragmented, almost prose poetic approach, or I can adopt a very narrative approach that reads more like a short story. I am completely unafraid to borrow from fiction and poetry, but I think I fundamentally approach writing from a different angle than poets. I find poems to be a quite self-conscious activity because it always feels like someone is going to walk into the room and say whatever I wrote isn’t “poem” enough.
Part of the self-consciousness, I’ve decided, comes from the lens with which I approach things. I care about big picture ideas and weaving bigger throughlines. A lot of my essays, I find, have a sense of distance within them that’s measured in years. I’ll be like, I had this idea, or this experience, several years ago, and in hindsight I think this is what it meant, and as of right now this is how I feel. Poems are not like this. I paint in sweeping, large brushstrokes, and poems, I find, use tiny ones. I think so many poems work at a microscale and evoke larger thoughts through juxtaposition. Notice this thing. Notice this unrelated thing. Notice this tangentially related thing. Here is some description with carefully chosen words that will evoke this other idea. When I write metaphors, they’re to explain an idea. In so many poems, the metaphor is the idea. I guess these differences probably sound minute but to me they matter. They’re the beginning of me trying to unravel why I find poetry so difficult.
I write long poems, for the most part. An average poem length for me is a page, or a page and a half, and I’ve been known to go even longer. I guess this idea of microscale versus macroscale explains a lot of where my tendency towards length comes from. Fundamentally, my poems are essays. Usually they’re essays I couldn’t figure out how to write as an essay, because the structure, the scaffolding requirements of the essay, are somehow impeding me. Essays require you to explain things, either explicitly or implicitly, but sometimes I have no explanation, and I can only explore. Then, I resort to poem logic, to juxtaposing thoughts and seeing what emerges. The poems I’ve written that I actually like were mostly written this way. I consider them to mostly be accidents.
When I attempt to write poems, I usually realize they’re actually essays. I haven’t figured out how to have ideas that feel small yet. I haven’t mastered the art of writing microlayers the reader needs to unpeel and I don’t know if I want to. I think this is at the core of my anxiety. It’s this feeling of wanting to paint with large, sweeping brushstrokes in the land of small canvases and tiny brushes.