I love poetry. However, given that its popularity is primarily archaic, it makes for a terrible career choice. Not too many poetry factories opening up these days and, let's face it, even if you're lucky enough to become a published poet, it's not exactly a rock-and-roll lifestyle. However, I decided that poetry was worth years of my life and my parents' money in order to obtain a degree in it.
Even if it may not be the most academic motivation, poetry is my way of exploring the world. I find that when I try to describe an idea or feeling from a different point of view, it allows me to handle it and feel out its shape and weight. It’s closest I can come to making emotions tangible, and I find it beautiful.
So why would I bother to get a degree in it? The short answer: I’m stupid.
I have never been particularly gifted in the realm of pragmatic thought and resonance. That’s the very reason why poetry is the vessel through which I explore this thing we call the human condition. Truth be told, I understand other people pretty well. I can listen to an individual and understand what they are really trying to say. That said, society makes very little sense to me. The way so many people are prone to being cutthroat when it comes to self-advancement (don’t get me started on traffic) is something I don’t particularly understand. I also don’t get how people grow from children who are capable of the highest forms of altruism and cruelty through blind ignorance into adults who are capable of the same through cold calculation.
I don’t understand the world as it is, so I try to understand it as it looks through my eyes. Sometimes the best way to try to understand something is to explain it. So I pretend I am trying to explain what I see to those that have never seen it before. I try to explain what color rain is in order to understand why it solicits such an emotional response. Sometimes I write about rain to try to understand why the smell of wet concrete calms me down.
Poetry is about the precision of writing. It is about focusing on the minuscule accoutrements we take for granted in our pedestrian life. I was born without a particular gift for this area of life, so as I grew I obsessed over it. Spent countless hours studying it. To me, poetry is taking the ugliness of the world and making it beautiful. This world is plenty ugly, so it takes a lot of effort.
On a Saturday morning, my favorite thing is still to wake up and sit down with a bowl of cereal to watch cartoons. I have held on to the ideals I came to believe as a child. Things are good, life is meaningful, being a good person is the highest aspiration we can have, "netflix&chill" is a stupid way to court the love of your life… y’know, the basic things like that. I’m still a kid inside and poetry is my way of learning how to walk through the world as an adult.
So why do I love poetry? I’m stupid and trying not to be.
