By Alexandra Itzi
You’ve probably heard “poetry is stupid” before. I know I have. However, I also have a confession to make: I have actually uttered this phrase as well.
That might seem like a contradictory statement coming from an English major—like a perverse form of self-hatred akin to a painter who hates pencils.
I love to write. I enjoy smearing words on paper and twisting letters together like unnatural lovers. Reading a great novel is as tantric and transcendental as it gets for me.
Poetry, however, always seemed to escape me. I didn’t have the patience to unwrap the language, to pull apart the images and get to the meaning hidden inside.
Poetry appeared to be a club I wasn’t allowed into unless I was wearing the right clothing, and I always got turned away at the door like some shabbily dressed transient.
When I read that April is national poetry month, I started thinking about my frustrated battle with this form of writing. I recalled my half-hearted attempts to untangle Pablo Neruda, to empathize with Emily Dickinson.
What I realized was that I’d never really tried writing poetry myself. Sure, I scrawled lazy couplets in my journal during my angst-ridden teens, but the minute I was introduced to Shakespeare and his archaic, mysterious language I clammed up without really understanding why. Without realizing it, I was intimidated by those ghostly voices of poets long deceased. They are revered centuries after their deaths for a reason, a reason obfuscated by dense language and even denser imagery.
Although we are told that we do not need to be painters to appreciate art, poetry is a slightly different animal. To some, that elusive understanding comes naturally. To me, and I imagine millions of others, it does not. And that’s OK.
I want to tell you that you too can emerge as a reformed member of the anti-poetry camp, and the path is a simple one.
Just write.
Write about your day, your favorite food, your lover, or the death of an ideal. Write about the lazy arc of a fallen leaf or a budding strand of weeds as they thrust through earth cracked and brittle from the cold of winter. Write about anything because it the very act that begins a web of connections, like neurons firing an electric grid across that quivering grey mass we call a brain.
Those images, and the feelings packed inside, are what you clothe yourself in as you stand before the doors of the poetry nightclub. Clothed in those images, you will be allowed entry, and you’ll understand what Neruda meant when he talked about the plum in the icebox because you once might have felt that way too.
You just didn’t realize it until you wrote it down.