Your Poet is Out There

I think poetry is for everyone and that everyone on this earth has a house poet- a poet that speaks to us personally. A poet that captivates and speaks your private internal language. I hear you sigh, the on-set of boredom at the mention of the word poetry. It brings back memories of school classrooms, smelling of hormones and sweaty armpits, stinky feet and classroom furniture. The memory of the language teacher getting you to read those incomprehensible lines that confused you and drooped the eyelids. But what if the poetry at school and what has come across your path since then isn’t YOUR poetry? What if Shakespeare wasn’t talking to you in your language or circumstance? What if, the words you need to read, are out there looking for you and ready to bring you into the delight and awe of the power of poetry?

Poetry is personal. No one can or should tell you what to like or dislike. Like music, an author or food, everyone has their favourites. Isn’t that the hope of the future, diversity and the fact that we are not all the same? God forbid everyone should like John Donne!  

Someone I respected deeply, once said that my favourite poet was too Pastoral. I stopped reading my favourite poet for a while because of this, but realised quite quickly thereafter that what I like and love in poetry, is just that, what I like and love. I don’t have to apologise for it. This personal aspect of poetry is key for me in my journey with poetry because I don’t waste my time anymore with poetry that I don’t connect with. It's logical right? Why would you spend time with someone who bores you and brings little value to your thoughts, feelings and emotions?

I didn’t realise this until the summer of 2006. I had always liked poetry. I wrote my first poem Take Notice in 1990. It came out of nowhere, really. Bubbled up. I didnt think it was any good because it seemed simple and understandable. I wanted to write like the greats. The greats wrote complicated poems with greek and old world references that were highly intellectual and not understandable. In a word, boring to me, of course. I felt guilty for thinking and feeling like this. If everyone in the world, I assumed this to be true, liked Shakespeare and William Wordsworth et al., then who was I to say otherwise? I didnt realise that not everybody likes the greats. It meant that I spent years collecting and reading poetry that bored me to tears. It was of course a good learning experience, for form, rhyme and meter etc., stay with me. Yet it left me cold, excuse the cliché. It felt like having to stay at the table and eat the food put in front of me, even though I didn’t like it. It wasn’t palatable.

I ate it anyway, because I thought it was good for me, but it left me empty. I thought this was the only poetic food available, in musty old books with references to things and themes long rusted in the memory of history. I didn’t get the connection with my life now as a youth growing up in the Apartheid years, hearing already then of the damage we were doing to the earth, and wanting to know how I fitted into to all of this, Shakespeare was silent. He didn’t speak to me. Or rather I was deaf. It can go both ways.

Then in 2006 someone posted a poem on facebook by Wendell Berry. The poem spoke so clearly to me, I can still recall the sensation. A bolt of delight, like electricity, sizzled in my brain and I felt like sleeping beauty after the kiss. I was suddenly awake and conscious of a feeling about poetry I had never had before. Connection. After that came delight. After that came infatuation. Here is the poem:

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

 in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

 I go and lie down where the wood drake

 rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

 I come into the peace of wild things

 who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

 waiting with their light. For a time

 I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The spring and summer of 2006 I will never forget. The weather was warm and dry, unusual for The Netherlands then, and I used my lunch break to go and sit on the bench by the water and read Wendell Berry. It was a two-minute walk from the office where I worked. The collected poems of Wendell Berry made me smile ear to ear. I had found my house poet, the person who spoke directly into me. I don’t know how else to say it. A kindred spirit. I believe everyone has such a poet. Wendell Berry is that to me. His poems don’t rhyme, they are not iambic, and they are beautiful. His poems are thoughtful and gentle and resilient. They are thought provoking and wonderful. I don’t expect you to think the same.

What Wendell Berry did for me was open up the poetic flood gates. I had not realised, I know it sounds stupid, that poetry could be anything you wanted it to be, literally and figuratively. Thoughts flow and can be written down as they flow, this is poetry. It helped me break loose from the strictures of poetic structure and gave me the tools and desire to write a lot of poetry. I think the most wonderful thing Wendell Berry did for me, was point me in the direction of finding poetry that I understand and speaks to me.

Thanks to Wendell I started a 365.poem challenge. I wanted to write a poem a day for a year.  Unfortunately, that never materialized. But the flood gates were open. Inspiration coming from all directions, I only had to be conscious. To date, I have written two hundred and sixteen poems. One of my most recent poems, Pitter Patter came like the rain it speaks of, naturally and flowing. I hope that one day I can close off the 365.poem project when the last in this number has been written.

For so long, I was reading poetry that made no sense to me. The words were readable, but as I said earlier in this piece, the connection was missing. Even after having it explained to me, or researching the meaning of a poem, it still seemed foreign, not a part of my experience. So, I discarded reading poetry that doesn’t make sense to me. I know this seems judgmental, but it’s my life.

In the past ten years, poetry has become so accessible because it comes in so many different forms. Spoken word poetry is an example of this. Check out Harry Baker in his TedTalk and be amazed at the way poetry can be cool and funny. So please, keep looking for your poet.

Poetry is a way of expressing oneself and the rules are cool, but not everything. Learn them and then apply them and then lose them. Rules are meant to be broken and your poet will most certainly do that, I am sure of that. They will draw you in, frame your world and help you understand how you fit in to it and then teach you how to live within it. If you are looking to learn the rules of poetry and understand it in a fun and delightful way of writing down your thoughts, then there can be no better book than Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

Penguin’s book Poems for Life is a great place to start your poetry reading journey. There are new and old poems. Funny and serious ones. It takes on the full gambit of human experience in poems.

For instance, this gem from Philip Larkin:

This be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

I believe strongly that your poet is out there, waiting for you, [If you have a house poet, please share their name and your favourite poem]. They have been writing poetry with you in mind all along in the hope that, one day, you will find each other. It will be the care you need in this crazy and extraordinary world. With a bolt of delight, you will awake from your poetry slumber (school induced, and fall in love with the words meant for you. My hope and wish is that your poet finds you as quickly as you want them too and that your beautiful self is reflected in their words. May you be inspired to write a few lines yourself, no matter how imperfect. A line to remember you by, please do it for yourself.  And if all else fails - breathe.

Breathe by Becky Helmsley

She sat at the back and they said she was shy.

She led from the front and they hated her pride.

They asked her advice and then questioned her guidance.

They branded her loud, then were shocked by her silence.

When she shared no ambition they said it was sad.

So she told them her dreams and they said she was mad.

They told her they'd listen, then covered their ears.

And gave her a hug while they laughed at her fears.

And she listened to all of it thinking she should,

be the girl they told her to be best as she could.

But one day she asked what was best for herself,

instead of trying to please everyone else.

So she walked to the forest and stood with the trees.

She heard the wind whisper and dance with the leaves.

She spoke to the willow, the elm and the pine

and she told them what she'd been told time after time.

She told them she felt she was never enough.

She was either too little or far far too much.

Too loud or too quiet, too fierce or too weak.

Too wise or too foolish, too bold or too meek.

Then she found a small clearing surrounded by firs,

and she stopped ... and she heard what the trees said to her.

And she sat there for hours not wanting to leave.

For the forest said nothing, it just let her breathe."