Why Poetry?

Back and forth, swinging from one to another – racing – no, palpitations? I second guess everything. The speed of my thoughts mimics, or perhaps prompts, the rapid drum of my heartbeat. They are conversing in a way I do not understand and cannot take the time to understand. Still, I look up the symptoms for heart attack. WebMD is no comfort when I’m already overthinking. From my roommate’s perspective, I remain stagnant; I sit in my room and stare at the wall. Although it is completely quiet on Cook campus, with nothing but the sound of a lava lamp inside and the low hanging trees washing over the sky with a hum outside, the inside of my mind is burning as it reaches to every possible thought to cling onto. They pile as I sink into bed. Have you finished that assignment? Did you text mom back? Does she know you are failing a class? What are you doing in college? Why are you taking these courses? Will Islamic Art and Architecture be useful to your occupation in the future? How will you support your family? Will you have a family? Will you be alone? Are you sure? Sick of it all, I quickly pull out the top drawer to my bedside table and retrieve what I need. The thoughts seem to quell instantly. I hope they are afraid of the weapon I yield: my journal. 

This routine is all too familiar to me, yet I always felt judging eyes when I discussed my love for poetry. In our freshman year of high school, my friend and I walked through the hallways, talking about our days and complaining about assignments. I listened to him speak about his dislike of our poetry assignment in English class–how he thinks poets try too hard to be sad, and all poetry is miserable. Why would someone ever choose to write poetry, unless they’re trying to be pretentious? From a realistic standpoint, I knew that he would complain regardless of the assignment. But, for another, absurd reason, I felt my heart beat faster, and I found it more difficult to maintain eye contact – staring at the glassy, reflective floor tiles. The slamming of a locker brought me back to the conversation. Why poetry? Do you just want to wallow in your own self-pity? Why not do something about it? Even though I wrote gratitude letters for my teachers, parents, and friends, would the style of writing declare my being as miserable? Or even worse, pretentious? These assumptions built my defenses, and they ensured that I would not share my poetry with anyone, ever. The pages of my brown, leather-covered journal remained completely intact; the journal itself remained hidden, stuffed in the very back of my desk drawer. My distress, hopes, and passions laid securely between the lines of paper, while those around me found me secretive, colder – more distant. This fate was easier to sink into than the idea of people scrunching their noses and furrowing their brows at the realization that I wrote poetry – a pompous man’s game. After all, no one wants to be close with someone who seems to idle in a state of despair, only reflecting on their own problems to boost their self-inflated ego. 

The difficulties I face expedite as a result of my brain’s tendency to dissect every possible outcome, picking at the scab over and over until it bleeds. As my mind oscillates from one stressor to the next, I drown in the weight of responsibility. These thoughts engulf and crash down upon me like waves as I do nothing but be still. Although those around me would argue that poetry is comparable to fishing in the sea – a dark, unknown, chaotic abyss, remaining at the pier for hours on end with no promise of reward – it feels instead as though I am fishing for the stars. Similarly to the endless ocean, the night sky is dark, encompassing, and empty. But, when you stop and inspect, there are billions of stars. Scattered aimlessly, they make the wide, unknown universe that lay out of our reach seem smaller. Why poetry? I’m taunted as I reel my rod back and throw my line out, attempting to grasp onto the stars so that I may have the same hold on my racing mind. When I finally catch one, I reel it back to Earth and open wide – it explodes like a gusher in my mouth, and it lights up the inside. I have starlight in my mind now, and it diminishes the daunting shadows that once towered behind my thoughts –some sort of enchantment. Why poetry? Do you want to wallow in your own sadness? Your own self-pity? These questions seem to evaporate as I write. Like the stars, poetry is always there. This avenue of expression conveys to me that I can live in a seemingly endless void of my mind and not be afraid. It lights up the corners of my brain, finds my thoughts, and removes their gory shadows – dissipating the monsters in the dark created by my own disorienting fear and turning them into inspiration. Poetry provides a model to shine, to glimmer through the assumption of sadness. Haikus, sonnets, and free verse did not feed me into a loop of despair, rather, they set me free. While writing, I come to conclusions that I would never have the spoken words for before. The guide of the stars in poetry gifts me a shining voice that echoes from beyond the clouds above. As bright clouds of flaming heat, they declare to me that feeling strongly and fervently will never be a weakness, but my finest strength. Verses are a tool to execute these overflowing emotions; stanzas unite them into coherency. With these affirmations in mind, I pick up my pen and discover the words to describe how I feel. When I search, it’s not as obscurely gloomy now. My thoughts are not endless, entrapping me. Instead, they are limitless – an opportunity to understand myself through the darkest times. 

Still, I stand before a thought that echoes from the words of others and my greatest fear: poets are pretentious. Is finding myself through my words a true mission? Is it genuinely a desire to know me? Do I actually just want people to see me writing? These intrusive thoughts pick at me, shut me down from writing in public, and restrain me from sharing my words with my friends or family. I struggle with this stereotype at the very core of my beliefs because of the way poetry makes me feel. When writing poetry, I am a child exploring the park for the first time. As a child, everything is so visceral. The monkey bars tower 5,000 feet in the air, the slides are a bright beaming yellow, and the static from a metal bolt in the merry-go-round floats your hair in an act of sorcery. Even more than the magic of experience, the playground is an open format. In the same way, poetry is the least judgmental writing I have encountered. It does not require me to hit a page number, quote count, or certain formality. I’m no longer spinning back and forth between racing thoughts, stuck on a one-track, a pendulum of a grandfather clock fatefully imprisoned by time. Rather, I swing. This time, I hold the braided handles of the playground fixture and watch my feet leave the ground. Although the swing’s path is a recurring loop, I find a new view in the sky each time. An oddly shaped cloud is a metaphor of hope, the sun’s wavelengths are a personification of seething resentment, and the plane overhead prompts the awareness that everyone is living a complex life on their own journey. I am an active child with dirt on my knees and chalk on my hands with poetry: freely flowing from one feeling to the next, absorbing the sights around me like a sponge and recounting my newfound perspectives on paper. There is no feeling in which to be afraid; all these findings ignite my curiosity while providing me the creative freedom to catalog them in the way I see fit. Perhaps, I’ll rip out a page to gift to my mother sitting on the park bench, and I’ll watch later with a toothless grin as she proudly hangs it on the fridge. A style that evokes emotion from both the writer and audience is permitted to be messy: what complex combination of human feelings aren’t? Pretentiousness holds rules, judgment, and penalty. With the freedom to live life for the first time, to see the world with freshly opened eyes, poetry lets the writer choose the words and demands no punishment for my tendency to color outside the lines. 

Now, I sit with my journal in hand. A wander through the pages reveals torn paper edges at the binding and rough drafts addressed to different names: all signals that I’ve grown to share my writing with those dearest to me. Darker passages are infrequent now. All the intimidating feelings I’ve battled in verse have equipped me with the words and resilience to speak them out loud to friends, to family–those who now understand me as open and communicative. I’m allowed to stumble into my discoveries on paper, prior to talking, hands stretched out before my body, ready to face what lay ahead. So, Why poetry? With its guiding stars that hold me in a knitted safety blanket of childlike wonder, I’m fearless.