Poetry summons us to life, to courage
in the face of growing shadow.
~Adam Zagajewski~
I’ve always approached poetry with fear, awe, and manifest destiny. As nearly all poets and artists say, it is something that I am compelled to do. Yet, I don’t understand that impulse to put words on paper in jaggedy little lines any more than I understand why pi constant, reliable pi travels on into infinity, number after number after number after number….
I believe I am one of the numbers that lives in the ellipses. Following thousands of years of beautiful writing, my own process of making poems sometimes seems a futile and vain endeavor. Yet, seen or unseen, each of those numbers is necessary.
So, I find myself wondering how I fit into the math–and writing poems that reflect that in their repeated search for identity, ancestry, and self-discovery. I also believe that critical elements to my own self-discovery lie in the lives of those all around me. As a poet and a storyteller, I feel it is my duty to pay attention to those lives, to tell their stories, and to find the ways in which those lives intertwine with my own–where do we meet? where do we diverge?
The machine operator, the hairdresser, the pharmacist–on the surface, I have little in common with those individuals. But their lives, like mine, are filled with everyday mundanity, beauty, and horror. They may not be glamorous. They probably won’t be on the cover of a magazine; but I believe they can teach me things about the world and about myself if I pay close enough attention.
Perhaps it is my working-class background or my 11 years of Catholic education, but I feel that in every endeavor there must be an element of service–a purpose that extends beyond the deed or the doer. So, although I write poems of identity, self-discovery, and personal conflict, my goal is that those poems should not be purely personal or self-serving. I strive for poems that are accessible, for language that “regular” people can relate to–people like my mom and dad, who have little college education and prefer sitcoms to sonnets.
Regardless of accessibility, however, I don’t want my poems to shirk their responsibility to the long tradition of craft and innovation. I don’t want them to get lazy, stale, or complacent. I strive for poems that say what needs to be said in the best possible way, without fear or judgment, without preaching or taking sides. I try to push my poems to the fringes of their comfort zones to get at the tingly places in language.
