I’m not willing to admit how much time I spent making this.

The Leaves of Grass I Raked

I would consider myself a poet.

My masterwork is a collection I call “The Leaves of Grass I Raked” and it contains 383 poems that I spent the vast majority of my life creating. Some of the most highly revered selections from my work include:

1. Voice-Crack of Myself
2. I hear America Wailing
3. When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Wilt’d
4. I Sing the Body Electrocuted
5. The Sleepwalkers

I am generally considered a pioneer in the field of modern poetry and I am credited with ushering in a new era of the “free verse”.

My work was received with mix reactions considering loose similarities to a widely unknown poet from the late 19th century. His name escapes me at the moment.

Like any great poet, I have my fans and my critics. But, to my critics I pose these questions:

“Is anything really original?” and “Can we be certain this poet didn’t copy from me?” Both of which are valid questions.

Two of my favorite literary devices are irony and sarcasm and more often than not, they find their way into my writing.

Walt Whitman happens to be one of my favorite poets and the first poet I had the chance to read in depth. High School was good to me creatively, and I had the option to take a number of stimulating English and literature courses, including a course called “Poetry as Power”. The teacher, Ginny Schauble, an intense, sharp and quirky woman led us in a semester of exploring the ins and outs of poetic structure as well as the work of some of history’s greatest writers.

We read authors such as Dante, Frost, Dickinson, Lee-Young Li, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Elliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay and of course, Whitman.

“Poetry as Power” inspired me and writing verses became a new creative outlet. The more I read, the more I fell in love with the form.

Poetry allowed me to bend words and ideas like no other literary form could. My words could now jump, run, break, hit, punch, scream and SING. My words had feelings. In poetry, every word, every comma, every indent, every period and every capital letter matter. The way a verse is split can change a poem’s entire meaning. Everything is intentional. Learning about and creating poetry shattered everything I knew about writing.

This style is the anti-christ to the high school writer. In an environment where B.S. is common practice and writing for completion is the ideal, poetry is a sore thumb. Poetry needs intention; it would be meaningless if only written for completion.

I’ve had plenty of friends tell me they don’t enjoy poetry, and I often wonder if they have taken the time to let the words sit with them. Have they taken the time to feel the poem? I understand that there are many styles of poetry and there are certainly some that I do not enjoy, but poetry requires effort.

I enjoy poetry because I find it cryptic but simple, beautiful but gritty, short but long, and languid but firm. A well written poem could be the most transformative art form I’ve encountered; there’s something about the way the words move that consistently challenges me and fulfills me.

In this poetry course I found inspiration. My teacher had us read one particular poem roughly 8–10 class periods in a row, and each of these days she asked me to read it aloud. Every time I read, it hit me differently. The poem was “Mnemonic” by Li-Young Lee. The poem goes…

Mnemonic

I was tired. So I lay down.
My lids grew heavy. So I slept.
Slender memory, stay with me.

I was cold once. So my father took off his blue sweater.
He wrapped me in it, and I never gave it back.
It is the sweater he wore to America,
this one, which I’ve grown into, whose sleeves are too long,
whose elbows have thinned, who outlives its rightful owner.
Flamboyant blue in daylight, poor blue by daylight,
it is black in the folds.

A serious man who devised complex systems of numbers and rhymes
to aid him in remembering, a man who forgot nothing, my father
would be ashamed of me.
Not because I’m forgetful,
but because there is no order
to my memory, a heap
of details, uncatalogued, illogical.
For instance:
God was lonely. So he made me.
My father loved me. So he spanked me.
It hurt him to do so. He did it daily.

The earth is flat. Those who fall off don’t return.
The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually.

It won’t last. Memory is sweet.
Even when it’s painful, memory is sweet.

Once I was cold. So my father took off his blue sweater.

I am not going to offer my interpretation of it’s meaning, but it certainly is one of my favorites. I have read this poem more than 100 times and I still question whether or not I understand it; part of the way poetry works, like many other art forms, is through what the viewer/ reader brings to the work. Not to say the meaning is relative, but rather, the work welcomes perspective.

Another one of my favorite poets that I discovered was William Carlos Williams. I was fascinated by his minimal style that relied heavily on imagery. A few of my favorites from his work include:

The Great Figure

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

We spent at least three classes analyzing “The Red Wheelbarrow”. It is so incredibly simple while also being terribly complex.

Contrast that poem with a poem from a colleague of William’s, Ezra Pound.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough. 

In two beautifully placed lines, Pound can capture an emotion, a setting and can place the reader into a provoking thought. Two lines!

After I had a firm grasp on the idea of poetry, I felt inclined to try it for myself. The early attempts were choppy and flawed in their intentionality, but I stuck with it. Whenever I thought of a line, idea or powerful word, or had a dream, I would write it down in the notes on my phone. I have roughly 300 notes on my phone right now and some lines I will never use and others, when the time is right, might turn into poems.

I wrote when I needed to capture the idea of an emotion, and when I needed to say things that conventional compositions couldn’t comprehend.

Love, family, and struggle were common themes in my work. Poetry became a leg of my creative voice.

Here are some examples of my work:

Curling Lash

I’m here now.
“Close them.
Hold. Keep them shut.
Don’t move.”
(She kept me waiting).
Okay, Look!
I opened them and
her fingers
stretched
out in front of my
face, pinching
the bending black
hair she had pulled from
my cheek.
Fingers locked,
it bounced under
the wash of her breath,
as a wish bounces from
one ear to the other.
“Blow it away”, she
said.
As if it that were a small
feat.
There’s the rub.
No dream or wish
or hope exists
in a black curling
lash,
but the vacant rooms
that spill idle
light into the
dark sky
are filled with
life.
Then it leaves,
as if it willed itself
from your
clasp.
Drifting where
dreamed dreams go
and I am left with your
empty hand,
cold and vacant.
Hands have a way of
speaking,
inviting.
A way of wanting.
It happened gently,
And in that moment
I knew.
Fire
and Ice could so
anxiously so
deeply so
desirably,
coexist.

Rave

I Am Not
insane,
but I’m stumbling straight
in a crowd of streaking blur, comforted only
by myself.
While they flow in a sea of ecstasy
and vibrating, pulsing,
erotic
sound,
they rule the world.
They jumped;
they swayed
and I was them.
I wish my
body was unfamiliar with
itself, infantile
and knowing
no confines
or restrictions.
I wish my body
knew nothing.
Only for a
moment,
and then I return
and I remember
the title
I earned,
the one I
kicked under
the bed as
I left.
An empty room doesn’t
lend itself to introductions.
I stand very
alone,
without fear of eyes watching.
I’m in the atrium
and all
I hear is the echo
of the
pulsing
bass,
pounding
on the
tangled flesh
inside my
skull,
and
shaking
my insides
out.

Slowly, I picked up tricks and established a style and I am continuously learning about and experimenting with the medium.

I’ve even tried combining poetry with some of my other favorite media. Photography provides visuals to accompany the text. When posting pictures on Instagram I will often write a verse or two, sometimes even an entire poem that is specific to that image. This was a poem I wrote for a picture I took last week (11/29).

“I was afraid
our memories had
befriended the alley rats.
I saw the corners
where brick bent,
and narrowed black,
and I kept my hands from sight.
I was tempted to hunt and to
rive rats’ roost to find them,
but I knew
that only naïve hands
tried digging life
from graves.”

To me, poetry is writing at its most complex and its most beautiful. It is a way to capture an emotion and share it. Poetry is messy and perfectly organized.

It’s challenging, puzzling and intricate. But…

Poetry IS power.