My Brief, Hideous Love Affair with Poetry
I used to write a lot of poetry, and publish a fair amount in the old print version of my zine, The Inner Swine. This was pretty awful stuff, though I have some affection for some of it yet, if only because it’s the product of my beloved brain, which I love more than most other things in the universe. Basically, anything my brain produces I love without reservation, and want to show all of you and be praised for. Yes, even including the poetry.
That’s essentially the problem with poetry, of course: Every asshole in the universe loves their own poetry, because to them it comes with all this built-in emotional resonance, which makes it seems special and interesting, when the fact is it’s awful and horrible. So someone like me writes a few lines of pathetic and unhappy verse because some girl didn’t look at him when he was 25 and drunk in a bar, and that shit feels dramatic and powerful. But you’re really just hungover.
Very Bad Things
Like all very bad things, my love affair with poetry began in college. College is an immense waste of time in so many ways — sure, I wouldn’t have landed my low-paying frustration-machine of an office job unless I’d gotten that degree, likely meaning I’d have spent my 20s and 30s living in my Mom’s basement.
But everything else? The alcohol abuse? The literary pretensions? And, yes, the poetry? All because college. Think on that when you’re contemplating taking out a second mortgage to send your mewling offspring off to school, friendos.
I took a creative writing poetry course because, in step with my overall college strategy, I wanted to take every course that required zero work I possibly could. Poetry? I knew for a fact I would be able to bang out some poems on the bus ride between my dorm and the classroom. Problem solved. And that’s exactly what I did, more or less. The only complication was that I actually kind of enjoyed writing poetry, or at least what I called poetry.
Here’s the one thing I will defend about my dabbling in poetics: It’s very freeing. For a writer, playing with words and images and releasing yourself from the onus of making any damn sense is a great exercise. You come up with phrasing and imagery you wouldn’t when you’re tied to a narrative and characters and all that. It can often be personally exhilarating.
The disconnect? “Personally exhilarating” does not always or often translate to “exhilarating for everyone who reads it.”
Moses Supposes His Toeses are Roses
I used to publish at least one poem in the zine each issue. At first, to be frank, this was because I thought some of my poems were, you know, good. Or at least, not bad. Or, maybe, expressing such raw and unique emotion despite their technical flaws and trite rhyme structures they would drive people to tears and suicide and I would become a new Salinger for a new generation, and perhaps sucked up into a spaceship by aliens singing Come Sail Away who would take me to their alien zoo where I would be installed in a luxurious Slaughterhouse Five-style environment labeled HUMAN GENIUS.
Something like that.
After a while, I came to realize I was never going to be the Poet Laureate of Hoboken, New Jersey, and continued to include poetry in each issue because by that point it was a running gag. I was secretly still proud of some of it despite knowing it wasn’t great, and I refused to give in to all the folks telling me to stop. This is my literary reputation, dammit, and I will ruin it if I want to.
Prancing through my old poems is like seeing your life from 20 years ago through a distorted, angry lens: I can sometimes pick out a moment that obviously inspired the poem, but more often it’s just a depressing collection of self-important bullshit.
Sometimes what grabs me is the brief moments of ambition, like a repetitive, Poe-esque rhyme scheme, or a formality that still appeals to me.
Examples? No, there will be no examples. Like the last surviving biological sample of a deadly plague, my poems will remain locked up in a radiation-proof strongbox for future alien archaeologists to discover, at which point my fame (or infamy) will be assured.
Jeff Somers began writing by court order as an attempt to steer his creative impulses away from engineering genetic grotesqueries. He has published nine novels, including the Avery Cates Series, the darkly hilarious crime novel Chum, and most recently tales of blood magic and short cons in the Ustari Cycle, including the upcoming novellas The Stringer, Last Best Day, and The Boom Bands from Pocket Gallery. He has also published more than 30 short stories and writes about books for Barnes and Noble and About.com and about the craft writing for Writer’s Digest. He lives in Hoboken with his wife, The Duchess, and their cats. He considers pants to always be optional.
