About Poetry

ph by me

Few years back, I’d write some stuff down, dream journal things, and I called it poetry. Somehow, I’d thought poetry was a mess of feelings on a page. Mostly, that it wasn’t creating anything new like free sketching. Poets used the same look, language. So writing a few lines given this medium seemed simple and redeemable.

I like the idea of control because it had stayed with me from my Dantist studies. Control allows one to mediate their appetite for noodles, sex, fame, whatever ring of hell one prefers. I still continue to observe what this lack of control or excess does for the soul. Boethius says it better: “The joy of human happiness is shot through with bitterness; no matter how pleasant it seems when one has it, such happiness cannot be kept when it decides to leave” (1962 Macmillian Pub). He goes on to say, we find happiness not in excess, but in controlled reasoning. Reason allows us to be content with what we have, rather than seek more. Reason is the key to mediation and human joy.

As I became more acquainted with the craft, I found a similar philosophy behind poetry. Poetry is about taking that mess of feelings (the excess) and refining them.  I seize literary device and selection to control the mess on the page. By doing so, something incredible happens. Other people can read it too. The audience gains access into the poet’s writing because it’s no longer a mess. And all the poet can hope for is that the reader doesn’t feel he has wasted his time.

It seems juvenile, but some of my edits are simple, one word. It took me a week to change the line, “she stepped” to “she ran.” Quickly, we notice the differences in tone, in agency, and sometimes these different words allow ourselves to realize how we think, or how we blame. It becomes a self-study. I frequently write about my mom, it comes naturally and it has served as a vehicle to write about myself. I find Boethius’ happiness in mediating my emotions towards her and am content in doing so. I must have the most selfish (and luckiest)  job of all, being a poet.

This must have been my first poem. Frui is one of the two defined loves in Dantist study. It is to love someone, not for themselves, but for the source of their creation. (Frui previously appeared in Qarrtsiluni and received the Bret Baldwin HM)

Frui

Mom always loved the rain. She loved the sharp edges of the stones
washed with it. Because she liked things clean.

It cleans every alley, she said.
God must like things clean. She was sure of this

more than the broken zippers
and the washed take-out boxes she saved in the pantry.

She loved to bleed.
I hope she finally sensed God’s cleaning in it.