Why I started writing poetry again
Writing songs was my poetry in disguise. Time to take off the mask.
Shaunta Grimes, one of Medium’s rock stars, wrote a post on why she doesn’t like poetry. She ends with the line:
Or I’ll learn how to play the guitar and start to write songs, like poetry in disguise.
This sentence gnawed at my brain, playing on repeat like an Ed Sheeran song, inescapable. But what was disturbing me?
Childish things
I used to write poetry, decades ago. Somewhere I discarded this memory. Packed it away with other childish things — Swingball, backflips, eating orange peel, wearing hotpants.
But it was a passion for a time. I was even highly commended in a children’s poetry competition, which triggered the end of my short-lived poetry career.
My poet persona tended to the tortured; Sylvia Plath was my role model, as was de rigueur for adolescent girls with creative pretensions. I was sure my almost prizewinning entry was meritless, its recognition a misunderstanding, a misjudgment, or both. With the clarity of youth, I knew I owed it to the world to stop writing poems.
So, I destroyed all my poetry. How I wish I had burnt it — easier, faster, and magnificently dramatic. Ripping up paper is boring and exhausting!
Though I destroyed the evidence, I believe the assessment of my juvenilia was correct. But as Zach J. Payne explains, it doesn’t matter if teenage poetry is terrible, its quality is not how it should be judged. I wrote poems to explore the world and myself within it. To burrow into a thought, feeling, or experience and discover who I was, who I wanted to be. My teenage poetry was successful by existing.
Poetry in disguise
Words are the soul of my songs, but they feel less exposed, less vulnerable than in poems. The multilayered musical camouflage is liberating; I can be playful with words in ways I did not dare in poems. And the lyrics and music synergize, enhanced by their intimacy, to birth a new creation, distinct from its parts.
But sometimes I am frustrated when listeners say they loved my voice but did not notice what it was saying. I know this is unreasonable! You can’t plaster yourself with make-up and simultaneously complain no one appreciates the real you.
Same view, different lens
I started thinking about the differences between my songs and my poems. I couldn’t find many. Their essence is the same. They focus on the incidental to reveal the fundamental. The difference is the years, not the media. When I was young, I wrote poems to understand things I thought adults knew, and no longer struggled with. Now I know we all struggle with the same things: how to live, how to love, how to make peace with ourselves.
For a song to resonate, the listener has to put their own frame around it, so it can hang on their own wall. The same is true of poetry. A good poem stimulates feeling without dictating what is felt. As Jim Morrison, poet and songwriter said
Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.
- Jim Morrison
A new poem
As I wrangled with these thoughts a question flickered in my brain, with increasing intensity — why not write poetry again? The need it served was alive and insatiable. Songwriting is fulfilling, but the proud simplicity of unadorned words is attractive. And I was on a 10-hour transatlantic flight, the perfect milieu……
So, here is my first poem as an adult. Writing it was like picking up a forgotten but much-loved game, or piano piece, or recipe — so delightful I can’t believe I packed it away.
Nazneen Rahman has released an EP and two albums. Her new album ‘I’m Too Old To Die Young’ will be released on 17th October 2019. Find out more here.
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