A poet friend posted on social media that she doesn’t think she will ever know why she writes poems. She should be commended for being willing to think about these things. Most people don’t. Most poets don’t. Even most poets I think of as good poets don’t. But, to admit we haven’t come up with an answer to an important question is always a beginning, not an ending.
I don’t want to suggest there is only one answer to this question of why we write poems. There may be many, and I wouldn’t want to rule any of those out before exploring them. For me, though, the question begins in how I write poems, and that how leads to a why. Writing begins in memories, emotions, and thoughts that exist as a kind of mental itch. Something isn’t quite right, or if it is right, it’s something that wants to become part of who I am and hasn’t yet. I may feel this for a few minutes and then sit down to write about it, or it may take days or weeks. Writing the poem is not an analysis of these unarticulated feelings. It is a process of allowing them to speak.
These days I tell my students to pay attention to how one image almost always leads to another image and one line to another line until the poem is complete. This is the how of the poem, and the poem is driven by, and only as good as, the materials that go into it (those memories, emotions, and thoughts). Sometimes, the materials are simply not ready, and the poem is inert. If that happens, I stop. It’s okay to wait for a poem. It may not feel great, but it’s okay nonetheless.
Poets these days have an undeniable interest in identity. For some, this expresses itself in identification with a group, but for others, it is a process of introspection, of answering the questions: who am I, and what elements go into that “who”? For whatever reason, group identification doesn’t interest me. What does interest me is what make each of us different, and I want to suggest that it has something to do with the particular mix of personal experiences, ideas, and feelings that are the same elements that knock on our doors wanting to be made into poems.
Most of our lives are spent reacting to events or to inner pressures or desires. These are real and feel real, but the person who reacts to these encounters is somehow undefined, amorphous. We use the pronoun “I” to refer to this person, and we can tell stories about things this “I” did or things that happened to this “I,” but those stories are only about how that person interacted in the world: they are not an answer to the question “Who am I?” If these stories were enough to answer the question, then the person other people think we are and the person we sense ourselves to be would be the same, but they rarely are the same. In other words, our social identities do not define us because they leave out our subjective sense of who we are. When we write a poem, it’s different. The poem embodies these mental events we can feel but not touch. It makes them real.
This is why I write poems. It is also why I read poems. The poems I write make me real to myself. When I read someone else’s poems, I am meeting a person, intimately, and because that person becomes real to me, reading the poem makes me a little more real to myself, less an entity reacting to biology and society and more a being in my own right.
I should add here that this is also a reason to teach people how to write poems. As poets have been prone to notice, we are constantly under pressure from the world outside ourselves. That exterior world, perhaps inevitably, seeks to define us, and as Wallace Stevens explained in the last century, the imagination—which is, I think, the mechanism of incorporating inchoate mental events into a reality—pushes back against that world. When students learn to write poems, they learn to define for themselves who they are, not merely to accept the definitions imposed upon them.
I have taught poetry and the writing of poetry in medium-security prisons now for almost eleven years. My students live in an environment that suppresses individuality. Prisoners are given a number when they come into the system, and that number is who they are supposed to be. Activities that encourage what the system views as rehabilitation are tolerated in a limited way, but authority cannot be questioned without repercussions. In such a place, poetry becomes a way for these incarcerated poets to define themselves as who they understand themselves to be, not as they are defined by the system that imprisons them. The act of writing a poem, no matter the subject, is an activity of resistance.
It is easy to accept the importance of this self-defining act in a context of incarceration or persecution, but is the normal world so different? Outside, we rarely manifest that subjective sense of ourselves that we think of as who we are. It is in the interest of employers, political parties, and social organizations of all sorts to encourage us to see ourselves as foot soldiers of those entities, and to take our identities from our engagement with them. For example, what employer does not want employees to identify with the company, to view the company’s well-being as their own well-being? And, don’t all countries want the same from their citizens?
When we write poems, however, we become citizens of a very different country. It exists inside ourselves and between the covers of old books. When we read poems, we meet fellow citizens of that country, even if they died a thousand years ago. Our experiences become more complex, and we understand those experiences more fully. In the same way, our sense of who we are deepens, and every time we write a poem, we allow that inchoate sense of ourselves to become a little more solid. Writing poetry does not necessarily make us better or more moral people. There are plenty of examples of poets who were awful human beings. But, it does make us more self-aware and more real to ourselves.
