#264: The Poetry Notebook
The shame of being a poet
Here’s an object that has become precious to me though it began with little significance. This notebook started with the promise of a project as I removed it from its shelf in TK Maxx, but at the time it was little more than a compulsive purchase. It didn’t hold anything greater than potential.
Then I started writing poetry again. That’s when the notebook changed.
I’ve had brief altercations with poetry, writing sporadically in my diaries or for school homework, but something about writing poetry seemed interlaced with shame. I’d absorbed a stereotype about those who wrote poetry; that they were sad, self-obsessed people, who only expressed angst in clichés. I couldn’t understand how someone went from being a shamefully solipsistic poet to a respected and revered one. I was convinced there was a huge difference, and that if I were to try myself, I would only ever be the former.
And so I didn’t share my poetry and I didn’t do it seriously. I didn’t work diligently on poems, picking apart the syllables until they clicked into place. I shared blog posts and journalism and essays, but I felt too embarrassed to let my poetry out into the world.
I think there is more stigma associated with poetry than other types of writing, perhaps because it is a more inaccessible art form. Beyond nursery rhymes, poetry isn’t something we typically grow up with outside of school. We might encounter Harry Potter novels easily enough, but somehow poetry slips by the wayside. Or at least, this was what I found. It was only when I sat in an interview for a certain prestigious university and was asked ‘Who is your favourite poet?’ that I wondered how I was supposed to have figured that out.
When I came to university, I went to a poetry reading for the first time, and I heard a young poet read aloud. I cried. The whole room was caught in the poet’s breath, and I felt part of poetry for the first time. I didn’t have to understand every image to be included in that experience. I could see a real person reading their own work, and I realised that there doesn’t have to be anything difficult or shameful about poetry. Standing in front of a crowd or a page and stretching out your words in an attempt to express: how could anyone dare judge you for that?
It’s taken a few years since that experience for me to get back into writing poetry myself, but I have finally begun writing in a less shameful way. In fact, I recently stood up in front of a room of around twenty people and read out one of my poems in front of them. I didn’t feel afraid and I didn’t feel judged. I simply felt the warmth of a group of human beings attempting to understand each other.
And it’s this shining notebook that facilitated that moment, collecting together my fragments so that I felt like I was doing something worthwhile. Lining up my thoughts until I had 85 pages worth and plenty more to go. This notebook proves that I am someone who writes poetry and who doesn’t need to hide it.
I am not a published poet, or a successful poet, or a respected poet, but I am proud of my poetry and of my honest attempts to communicate, and though I would never dare open this notebook in front of you, I may just read you a segment or two.
For an art form that physically only requires paper and pen, and not necessarily as extravagant a notebook as this, the mental obstacles to writing poetry seem large. But I am finally making an effort to ignore them, and I hope I might encourage others to do so along the way.
