Poetry, Ever at My Back

“For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.”

— Robert Frost, “After Apple-Picking”

I never enjoyed reading. Despite goading from my parents and the constant tug of teachers to soak myself in books, the idea of reading was anathema. Boring. Tedious. Just another homework assignment.

Writing, on the other hand, was a god-send. Nothing was (and is) more exhilarating than a blank page and an idea, prime for molding. Even the five-paragraph essays of high school were a stirring challenge: How could I sway a reader so slyly, they would never think to contradict me?

This writing-no reading paradox gnawed at me. How can you write well without reading? You can’t. Stephen King said as much: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the tools to write. Simple as that.” And while I never forced myself to pore over the classics or scour academically-minded newspapers just so I would be well-equipped, I begrudgingly came to agree with King.

Thusly, I pursued English in college. I still didn’t like to read, but I understood it as a necessary evil. I slogged through Hemingway and Dickens and Homer and Heller. It was all terribly tedious, but I felt that my efforts earned me a place at the writing table.

Then I discovered poetry. In years prior, it lingered somewhere in the background, treated as necessary literary exposure in high school English classes but seldom something with heft. Renaissance poetry, revealed my sophomore year of college, changed that.

It’s almost impossible to describe the awe that followed from a reading of the British masters: Keats, Wordsworth, Eliot, Byron, Tennyson. You know them well, I’m sure. For most, their work is a stepping stone to expression of the sublime, a mingling of spirituality and natural wonder. For me, their words did things I did not think words should ever do. Dirty things. Wondrous things. Dark things.

I have to laugh at my obsession. I was so enamored of this new expressionism that I wrote one of my midterm English exams in the style of a Renaissance poet. The professor did not find it amusing, urging me to analyze not mimic. I addressed this in his musty office one rainy Wednesday afternoon: “Do you ask us to analyze because we cannot hope to be writers ourselves — as good as the Byrons of the world?” He waffled. No one had asked him before.

Later, I would broaden my horizons, wrapping my attention around Robert Frost and Billy Collins and Emily Dickinson and Mary Oliver. Their work was more accessible, though nonetheless astounding. And, perhaps more than anything else, the simple power of poetic concision struck me. How could such dry, prosaic words evoke such images, such emotion?

In short order, I began writing poetry to accompany my education in verse. Somewhere in a series of beaten-down cardboard boxes, I have hundreds of loose leaf pages with fragments of poetry from the early days: rhymed verse, sonnets, meditations, Dickensian life lessons, dialectic what-ifs, improper prayers, and countless poorly-penned copies of the poets I adored. You could trace my evolution in writing just by scouring boxes of lackluster poetry.

Throughout all of this, I wrestled with an unfortunate truth: I was not a very good poet. In fact, I have spent most of the last 10 years writing prose, becoming fairly proficient in a number of narrative styles. I enjoy the conjuring of stories in my brief fiction; the shaping of real-life characters in exposes; the paving of winding emotional roads in many-layered histories.

And yet, I keep coming back to poetry. Not because I’m convinced that, with enough practice, I’ll suddenly become a poetic marvel. No; I have realized that my relationship with words is invigorated when I read and write poetry. As I see it, the rules of writing are suspended for poets: Let the words, upside-down and misshapen, fall where they may. When you recognize that their startling new forms — like a Picasso strikingly outside proper proportion — evoke a new feeling, inspire a new thought, reveal a new truth, then you have the tools for richer prose.

Case in point: my reading of “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost. He was always a gifted hand at poetry, masterfully painting the rural and bucolic. And while I could deeply feel his simmering sadness and the waxing fatigue of that apple-picking day, there was an indescribable magic in the words themselves. This line especially: “There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch.”

The weighing on; the duplicative cadence; the accessibility of the words. I’ve referenced this line often in my own writing — poetry and prose — and it has convinced me, along with countless other fabricated idioms, wildly misused language, and unexpected lexical turns, that I would be no writer at all if I had not, one day, decided to read and write poetry as a permanent practice.

My teachers, my parents, my mentors — they got their wish. I’m now an ardent reader. Though I’m sure they did not imagine my creative attention falling so heavily on reams of poetry.

But they did not know Frost like I do. Said the master: “Writing a poem is discovering.” Indeed, Robert; this is why I read and write, poetry ever at my back.