It’s officially been a year since I wrote a new poem. It’s also been a year since I last performed poetry in front of an audience (albeit a virtual one).
A part of me knows I shouldn’t feel too bad about it. After all, the narrative poem I wrote last November is one of my favorites, and it inspired a novel that I’ve been drafting all year.
But I never intended to abandon poetry for this long. Honestly, thinking about it bums me out. Before the pandemic, being a poet was so central to my creative and even personal identity. In some ways, it still is, but I don’t know if it’s fair to call myself a “poet” these days.
I started writing short rhymes regularly in my mid-twenties as a way of coping with a difficult time. In a yellow composition notebook, I started scribbling little rhymes, mostly about food and animals and feeling restless in at home.
With titles ranging from “Grocery Shopping” to “Chicken Pie Lake” and “Fuck Yeah Robert Frost!” the poems were messy and foolish and carried an undercurrent of dissatisfaction, hunger, and horniness. Take for example a rhyme titled “Butter Dream” that begins:
I dreamed you were butter
I was the bread
Fresh from the toaster
And on me, you spread…
I didn’t take any of what I was writing seriously, and didn’t intend to share it, which removed the pressure of perfecting it.
But once I amassed enough scribbles in my notebook, I wanted to digitize and organize them. I signed up for a website called Hello Poetry (or “HePo”) and began uploading them there.
Unexpectedly, other poets on the site found my poems and began messaging me about how much they liked them. A lot of the poetry on HePo is melancholy free verse, and I stood out with my silly Seussian rhymes. I even found a poetry pen pal through the website (Hi Jeff!).
Excited, I began a practice of writing and uploading a new poem every Sunday. Every Sunday became every Sunday and Wednesday.
I kept writing two rhymes a week in forms ranging from limericks to sonnets and sometimes longer, more experimental works. Sometimes they were remixes of some of my favorite rhymes by poets like Dickinson, Whitman, Longfellow, and Poe. One take on Dickinson begins:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
And giant scaly wings -
With seven eyes and two black horns -
And other beastly things -
Validated by comments and likes, I kept writing, unaware that I was amassing a collection that would later help me forge connections in the real world, not just online.
I continued writing rhymes even as I ended a long-term relationship, “came out as gay” (quotes to denote oversimplification), started a new job, and moved to a new town where nobody knew me.
In the chaos of my life then, the twice weekly poems provided me small pockets of order and amusement. Beyond HePo, I made myself a little website and started hosting the poems there too.
In my new town of coastal Ipswich, MA, the coffee shop around the corner from my studio apartment advertised a monthly poetry open mic. One August evening, I was in a sour mood from some lingering conflicts resulting from blowing up my life. I decided, fuck it, I’m going to go read some of my poetry. If I get boo’ed, I’ll just never go back! I was so nervous, but I felt I needed to shock my system.
That impromptu open mic was my door into the local poetry community which would grow over the next three years.
From that open mic, I learned about and joined a local poetry group. I began meeting other poets who kindly invited me to perform my rhymes at different events and festivals in the wider North Shore area. I performed at a color fest, a light fest, and even a clam fest.
One of my favorite memories from this time is reading my homage “To My Dear and Loving Pussy” (an ode to my vagina and a spin on “To My Dear and Loving Husband”) after a lecture given by an Anne Bradstreet scholar. Unlike the rest of the audience, the scholar appeared quite unamused.
My unexpected budding identity as a “poet” coincided with rebuilding my life and overall identity.
But as my social life ramped up, my writing slowed. I remember the exact day I stopped writing two poems a week, and it was because I was invited to a party after work.
As my workday came to a close, I had to decide—would I go home and write a poem like I would normally do on a Wednesday evening, or go to this event that I knew would take up the rest of my night? I chose to go to the party.
I still continued to write Sunday poems for longer though, even as it became more difficult to find the time. Often I’d wake up early on a Sunday just to scribble something, sometimes still in bed, before heading off to some adventure.
I don’t remember when I stopped writing Sunday poems altogether.
With the election of Trump in 2016, the poetry world where I found myself entrenched became more political. Poems about injustice and anger seemed to swell, and suddenly my rhymes about beasts and butter felt trivial. I tried my hand at political rhymes, but they never quite landed for me.
Still, I kept attending poetry events and performing. In 2017, I published a chapbook of some of my “pre-Ipswich” poems. In 2018, I showcased my poem “Where Is Your Darkness?” in a local art show. The poem concludes:
Hey, hello, how are you?
I’m fine, thanks a lot.
Tell me, where’s your darkness?
What shape has it got?
As my poetry circle grew outside the North Shore, I began to recognize that I was surrounded by a lot of poets and poetry dealing with not just with political and social injustice, but with trauma, tragedy, depression, and grief.
I met poets who shouted into their microphones and pounded podiums. Poets who couldn’t read their words aloud without crying. I saw my role as being the poet who would bring the audience some lightness and a little laughter. At events where reading order was predetermined, I noticed I was often placed with this in mind.
I was uncovering internal politics within the poetry world as well. There appeared to be two rival camps—mainly poets and groups focused on craft and poets focused on community. The former tended to be exclusive, academic, and serious. The latter inclusive, grassroots, and lax.
Divisions ran deep and largely had to do with money, higher education, and proximity to Boston. I dabbled in both and found these rivalries annoying.
One of the last times I read poetry in front of a live audience was at an open mic-style wake for a poet friend who died suddenly in 2019. It was one of the saddest events I’ve ever attended in my life.
This is all to say that as time went on, poetry got really heavy and complicated for me. And that was even before the world shut down in 2020, and the open mics and events all went virtual.
I’d started out writing silly rhymes for my own amusement when I was in a dark place. I discovered they could be a light in other peoples’ darknesses, too, and it was a gift to be able to share them. To have ever even been referred to as a “poet” in public still feels wild to me, like a privilege I never deserved in the first place.
I’ve blamed my withdrawal from poetry on the pandemic (so much “Zoom fatigue” I’m tired of saying it) and other writing projects. But truth is I’ve had the time to write poetry over the past two years that I’ve mostly spent at home. But I just haven’t. I keep asking myself—why? What’s stopping me?
When I approach writing a poem now, I can’t help but think about who I’ll share it with and how it’ll sound performed. This is something I didn’t think about at all when I first started rhyming. So, a level of self-consciousness might be stopping me.
But, like most things, I think it’s more complicated than that.
Poetry is now so heavily tied not just to the places and people I miss, but to a sense of self that has been completely upended by the pandemic.
Now in 2022, I find myself in a similar—though not exactly the same—situation as I did seven years ago, when I started scribbling rhymes in my composition notebook. That is, I’ve recently woken up to the fact that I’ve been unhappy for the better part of the past two years. I realize I’m restless and hungry for something I can’t quite make sense of yet.
Like back then, I feel a pull to both escape and sort my feelings through rhyme, but taking the time to do so feels frivolous. After all I’ve got a novel manuscript to finish, final work due for class, plus a full-time job to keep the rent paid.
My poetry is frivolous. It always kind of was, but that’s what I enjoy about it. Making time for frivolity is important. I don’t have to take it so seriously. I don’t have to do it all. But if I want to, I should.
I don’t know yet if I’ll share any of what I’ll write as I dip my toes back into rhyming again. But I’ll share this one…
Shoshin (Beginner’s Mind)
I used to be a Poet
I used to find the time
To put my thoughts and feelings
Into a metered rhyme
I used to sit in silence
Lingering with the page
Thinking I was clever
A Dickinson of my age
But rhyming became lonely
So I set out to share
Into the world and found — behold! —
Friends waiting for me there
I ran amuck not unlike
A fox freed from her cage
My pen became a party
A microphone my page
I met so many people
Who I came glad to know
They would say “Come out with us”
My Ego would say “Go”
I worked, I played, I loved
I snatched life right by the jaws
But though my world has broadened
Lately — I wish it’d pause
I have no time to linger
To do so feels like sin
I feel this nagging pressure
My patience wearing thin
Now I’m a trusted colleague
A partner and a friend
But am I still a Poet?
Or could I be — again?
I miss myself in silence
As I am here right now
I might still be a Poet!
May I remember how —