Playing With Fire

The Quiet Thrill of Writing Poetry

I don’t want to concern any of you, but I have been writing poetry. Sounds dramatic, but it has been cathartic. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted, writing wise.

My opinion of poetry is simple: if a poem doesn’t make you wince, gasp, cry, sigh, scream, nostalgic, angry, or second-guess your own choices and beliefs; it’s not worth writing. Not to me.

I am not interested in flowery or descriptive poetry. I’m also not interested in the kind of wordy self-reflection I write in essays. I love an essay. I am an essay, but when it comes to poetry I want the hard shit. I want to freebase the human experience. I want to read in a few condensed stanzas words chosen for balm and bullets. I want a to read something so intense that if you could bottle the feelings a good poem gave you, load them into a ray gun, it wouldn’t be allowed on airplanes because it’s technically phycological warfare. I want words that can bruise a rib, heal a cold, and make me believe in love.

Which is why I’m not sharing any of it just yet. I’m still cooking. But just trying to be a poet has felt transformational. I’m back to how I used to write in my early twenties, when I would be in the middle of something like washing windows to a podcast and have a thought so good I scramble to write it down, dropping everything for a few perfect words I’ll certainly forget.

It feels like dating. It feels like a crush. I makes me excited to wake up and look at the world differently.

When I share these poems they may not be good. They will be horrifically honest and vulnerable in a way I haven’t shared before. It’s not like I’ll be revealing any secrets, but what poetry does expose is why a person wants to live and why she is afraid to die.

To me, a poem should say in a few words what a novel tries to convey in thousands. Like trying to get the bible into a fortune cookie. A few lines should deliver the weight of a lifetime, tell a story so strong it knocks the wind out of you. Poetry is the strongest distillation of emotion, something so raw and necessary sharing it feels like coming up for air.

Poetry shouldn’t tell on you, it should be you. And I don’t want to share a single poem that I wouldn’t use as the epitaph. That’s how important it is to me. I understand there’s plenty light and fun poets and adorable sweet poetry, but I am not that. I’m this.

(stay tuned)