Why I Hesitated to Call it Poetry

“You won’t understand.”

To be clear, she didn’t say, “You might not understand.” or “It’s tricky to understand.”  She said, “You won’t understand.” She was another student in my organic chemistry class in 1992 and she was telling me about the poetry written by her mother, a well-respected poet. She knew I was acing chemistry, so I didn’t take it as a jab at my intelligence.  It felt more like she was describing a club, and I wasn’t invited.  Door slammed, no entry.  I wasn’t welcome.

I hadn’t thought about that experience very often until recently.  I loved poetry before that incident and read it on my own.  I had been introduced to William Blake by a boyfriend and I was off.  After the conversation with my classmate, I shied away.  I suppose I found other boyfriends and other ways to connect and feel moved.

I spent most of college studying science, anthropology, and traveling to East Africa. I liked understanding the natural world and was interested in learning about people, their choices, and cultures. I wanted to understand how things were connected and how they worked.  Biology gave certain insights that I found satisfying. I thought that I wanted to be a doctor and went down that path for a while, spending a year at medical school before making a change to get a master’s in psychology.

Life became a little more practical and I got a job investing in medical devices. It was interesting, challenging, and creative in its own ways, and it allowed me to take care of my family. I was busy juggling a demanding job and raising my kids. It was wonderful in many respects, but my life lacked an artistic outlet.

Writing had never been something that I was particularly comfortable with.  I had gone to traditional schools where the style of writing that was expected was very formal and structured. Three paragraphs, topics sentences, perfect grammar.  Hemmed in, right or wrong, thoroughly stifling. 

Sometimes life throws you second chances, and in my case, it was through my son’s high school English classes. He also wasn’t much of a writer and so in the evenings I would help him with his homework. He was fortunate that the pedagogy had evolved, and his school had incorporated the Columbia Writers program approach which encouraged students to get their ideas out and worry about cleaning them up later. The focus was on the ideas rather than the grammar.  It sounds obvious, but it was wildly liberating to me.

The process emphasized the freedom to express and I spent a lot of time encouraging my son to just get his thoughts on paper.  Not to feel judged, not to worry about the spelling, just to communicate a point of view.  What I didn’t realize was happening until much later, was that I was teaching myself the same lessons. The lessons that I hadn’t learned as a student.

He had one class where he read a lot of poetry. I read what he read. Emily Dickenson, ee cummings, Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver. He then had to write his own poems. It was an especially fun part of the syllabus and we played with stories, words, and structure. It was my first experience enjoying writing rather than finding it a chore.

After my sister died unexpectedly in December 2019 and lockdown began, I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way because I was looking for a creative outlet.  I had a bit more free time because I wasn’t traveling for work and I had the urge to make something.  I envisioned making sculpture or jewelry.

Per Cameron’s suggestion, I started writing daily for the first time in my life. She calls it “Morning Pages”.  You get up and write three pages before doing anything else.  There are no rules about what one writes – it’s personal writing that is not intended to be shared with anyone. The unstructured part grabbed me. I had things to say, and it gave me a way to get them out.

I found that in those early morning fuzzy times, I didn’t need to force anything. I could listen to my subconscious and hear what it was telling me. I was spending a lot of time outside walking and appreciating the nature and beauty around me.  It offset the deep grief and fear that permeated those days. Much of what came out were analogies with trees that described elements of myself and what I was feeling. I had just lost my younger sister and the pandemic was sweeping the earth.  Staring in the face of death has a way of forcing one to look in the mirror and decide if they like what they see.

At some point, per Cameron’s instructions, I reread everything that I had written longhand. Initially, I decided to type it up because I wanted to be sure that my kids had a copy. I thought it said something about me that they should know. Eventually, I concluded that there was something more universal in the writing that I wanted to share.  I had written dozens of entries.

I called what I had written “entries” because the label “poem” was like kryptonite. If what I wrote were poems, it would mean that I was a poet.  I was a lot of things, but I was not a poet. The poets were over there, in their club house, talking amongst themselves.

When I spoke to publishers, they also made it clear that poetry was off-limits.  Poetry is especially hard to sell and while no one said it directly, I sensed that one had to be “in the club” if one was going to publish poetry.  It remained abundantly clear – I was not in the club.

When I worked with my editor, the topic came up again. This time it was a bit different - she wanted to call what I’d written poems.  I argued vehemently and continued to call them “entries”.  She insisted and I resisted most of the summer that we worked together. 

Finally, she sent me an interview with Ada Limon in Publisher’s Weekly right after Limon was named poet laureate.  Limon said “I believe deeply in the power of poetry to help us reconnect with our emotions, our feelings, our true selves. Reading poetry is always my way of remembering that I must be broken open to begin to heal, to find my way to joy. I very much want to amplify the message that poetry can help us reclaim our humanity, that poetry can be a tool to find our tenderness, our vulnerability, and our power again. I think recognizing our emotions, having empathy for other people’s experience, that makes us better people, it makes us braver too.”

YES! That was why I was writing.  To reconnect. To be vulnerable. To be brave.

And then she went on to say, “Most of us live feeling very separated from nature, but poetry about the natural world reminds us that deep looking, paying attention, is a way of loving, as a way of reminding us that we, too, are nature.”

YES, YES, YES. My book, Morning Leaves was deeply rooted in nature. The door was cracking open…

Finally, she said “These days, it seems everyone expects us to move on so quickly, to grieve at record speeds, to recover from trauma as if it was nothing. We are careening from one catastrophe to the next. But poetry allows us to do that work of honoring, of grieving, of feeling complex emotions in order to become more fully alive.”

BOOM. That was it. What she described echoed exactly what I hoped my writing would convey. Ada Limon, as poet laureate, was the newly anointed president of the poetry club and I felt welcome, invited. I felt like she was speaking directly to me. Maybe she was. 

Maybe I had to relook at my work. Maybe I had to relook at who I had become. I listened to her encouragement, peeked through the club house door, and stepped in. 

It’s early days, but I have finally begun to call my work what it actually is: poetry.