The Poetry Dimension

I have been telling stories since I first learned to speak. I’ve been writing since I first had the motor control to grip a pencil in my little ravioli fist. One of my two Bachelors degrees is in Creative Writing, for goodness sake! I like to imagine, dear friends and enemies, that I have made somewhat of a life for myself out of the written word. But if this is the case, dear reader, then why does poetry confuse and upset me so damn much?

My first undergraduate creative writing class was, in fact, Intro to Poetry. In it, I learned about the creative versatility of the written and spoken word, and the plethora of muses that exist for the fledgling poet to take on in their pursuit of creative liberation. Somehow one summer, in the sudden absence of a different student, I was tasked with providing feedback to hundreds of high school poets who had submitted for the university’s teen magazine. Hell, I even provided a similar service when I read poetry (and prose) submissions for The Lit Mug, a literary mugazine I once ran with my friends. I am not inexperienced in reading and trying my best to verbalize my experience with poetry, and yet, when it comes time to offer feedback, I can only really ever say, “Wow, these are certainly words, and you definitely wrote them. Super cool.”

Perhaps the sheer expressive potential of poetry daunts me. Perhaps the expansion of poetry from a literary art into a sonic art as well provides something that I simply do not have the mental fortitude to process passively. However, there is so much poetry that exists that I also simply cannot lend attention to every piece of it to be actively moved by it. I then wonder, by that token, should I let myself be moved by it? Is there actually something unattainable to me here?

In our undergrad, my fellow prosewrights and I would speak of something known only to us as the Poetry Dimension, a mythical dimension that only the poets among us had access to. In it, communication was only abstract, symbolic, allegorical, expressive without being concrete in any way, shape, or form. Our poetic peers in the program would reside there, and there they would write the smatterings of words that got them published in literary journals on-campus and off-campus. They would reach critical acclaim from professors and readers, and yet whenever I flipped through their chapbooks on the shelves of the Writer’s Institute, all I would find were words, nothing greatly affecting me one bit.

Of course, maybe this has something to do with my own view of writing. Words to me are purely functional. Sure, they may be florid from time to time, but ultimately, I want to express something concrete. My favorite song lyric of all time, from “Going to Georgia” by The Mountain Goats, is: “The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you, and that you’re standing in the doorway.” There is nothing remarkable about that language. It’s blunt, it’s literal, and yet it’s filled with this incredible and tangible pathos that I don’t get from any sort of free-verse poem that has the same message. When I do dabble in free-verse, it’s simply to enter a competition on Vocal, and when I write poetry in general, it’s almost always a sonnet to impress a beautiful woman with my masterful control of language (it does not work). When I read the work of others on Vocal, I can seldom understand what makes a good poem and what makes a mediocre poem. Is it the line breaks? It’s the line breaks, right? If I did that in the middle of a short story, I’d be tarred and feathered. Why do you have to fracture thought like that?

Perhaps I will never traverse the Poetry Dimension. Perhaps I will be a weaker author because of that. Or perhaps poetry is a literary circle-jerk and I’m right for never subsuming myself fully into the manner of expression. (After all, I do find it suspect that the only people who appear to be in tune with the quality of poetry are the people who stand to profit from it.) In whichever case, I assume you poets will keep poeming on parallel to me as I try my best to accomplish whatever I set out in prose to accomplish. Keep it up, I suppose. I literally cannot tell if you’re doing a good job or not.