I wrote a fair amount of poetry when I was a teenager; I think a lot of people do. Most of it was not very good because most modern American adolescents tend to be fairly solipsistic and don't have a lot of life experience to draw on. Some of it was maybe not so bad; I got a couple pieces published in my high school's literary magazine and one of them even won a prize.
But I abandoned that when I got older. More "serious" pursuits came to the fore, and also, I admit, I felt at times that "if no one else is going to see it, it's not worth doing" and also "It's not that good and I don't want to try submitting any of it anywhere because the rejection will be too unpleasant."
But now, at 50, I'm realizing a few things:
a. Having a blog means I can "publish" my poems if I want and the worst that could happen is either I get a mean comment, or maybe some idiot decides to mock me on their own blog, and honestly? Making fun of some random woman's poems on your own random blog is not exactly....I don't know...high crimes and misdemeanors or something. I mean, making fun of some non-professional's decidedly non-professional efforts that they up-front say "this might not be very good but" is fruit that is so low-hanging it is on the ground.
b. I can write them for me if for no one else. Somehow, it's helped a bit in this horrific past two months with too many bad things happening to be able to sit down and just stick words on a page in pretty much the same format as I think. (My stream of consciousness is pretty much like what is sometimes called "free verse poetry." I am not so good at torturing my thoughts into a rhyme or meter scheme, which is why I think the stuff I just write without trying to make it conform to some pattern is better, it's freer, and I'm not sticking in a word that's not quite right because it rhymes or has the correct number of syllables)
c. Maybe the secret to writing good poetry is not so much "you have to be a good poet first" but that "you have to write a LOT of poetry, and it's the best 2% of it that sees the light of day." Granted, yes, some people are better poets than others but maybe....maybe it's less "having a gift" and more "working at a craft"? So maybe I could get good? Or at least get better?
d. Poems are a relatively safe form of creation for me; the failure of a poem feels like less of a failure than the failure of, say, designing a sweater. Part of that is that when I'm inspired, the poems kind of write themselves - they do not take months of wrangling with the math and decisions and just the sheer making-stitches that knitting requires. So maybe I'll never be a knitwear designer but maybe I can write poems? Okay. I can be happy with that.
e. Also the inspiration comes at odd times (unlike knitting ideas or even research ideas, which are hard-fought and hard-won) and I sometimes find myself writing the poems in my head while doing something else (two partial ones came to me while I was working on my research task this morning). That's more "convenient" in a way than knitwear design, where you have to sit down and actually do the dedicated work of knitting - where you can't really be doing very much else (at the most: listening to an audiobook) while you do it. But poems come as easily sometimes as thinking does, and if anything, I think TOO much....
f. Maybe whatever sort of Muse I once had is returning to me? To help me deal with the grief and also the general freaked-out-ness of realizing "hey, if my dad can die that means I will die some day" and the generalized staring-into-the-abyss that triggers.
So maybe in the coming weeks there will be a few more poems up here. I actually wrote three short ones in draft this morning. At least two of them I feel like they need a lot more polishing, but they have the germ of something meaningful to me.
And yeah, yeah, I know: I'm trying to ignore the mental image I have now of Aunt Gayle from Bob's Burgers with her absolutely terrible poems. ("Little cat, you're just like me. You go outside and squat to pee. SQUAT! SQUAT! SQUAT!") but....yeah. Maybe part of doing something like this is stuffing rags in your inner critic's mouth, tying them up, and sticking them in a corner while you work.
Oh, and the title of this? Before I forget about it....I tend to do that...but my grandfather wrote poetry. I have one of his poems ("To the Steger") posted up on my file cabinet at work. It was published in Music Trade Review in 1918, and for a while it was available online (I got it, I think as a scan from the magazine that was posted online), it seems to be gone now. (I should scan my copy so I have a digital copy, and then I could also post it here for posterity. Not sure who owns the copyright though, but then again: it's a 102-year-old poem written by my grandfather and I'm not going to profit from posting it).
But I do wonder, though I barely remember him* - could I be more like my grandfather (because genetics does weird things in determining personality) than I realize? My mom has commented several times that someone (maybe a sister of his?) used to say "Cy will go around in the same terrible beat-up coat for years, but if a new book comes out that he wants, he buys it immediately" and while I was not yet at a book buying stage when my grandfather was alive, that is also very on-brand for me. And the slight tendency to what might be called "flightiness" in a woman - oh, I keep mine under HEAVY control because I also know I am the only person in this world I can depend on - but yes, he had some of that too, from reading his memoirs. And the whole hopeless-romantic thing: again, I cloak mine under a heavy layer of cynicism-about-love/tsundereness but yeah. It makes me sad I didn't know him better because I think in some ways we would have been kindred spirits. Though again, given his upbringing, I'm not sure he'd have known what to make of a granddaughter like me; his views on women seem to have been very traditional and in this day and age it is well-nigh impossible to be a "traditional" woman.
(*He died in 1976, so I would have been 7. I mainly remember him as an old man with a shock of white hair and a heavy cough and who smelled like pipe tobacco. Some years after he died my grandmother gave me his set of Columbia Encyclopedia of Literature - a 1920s era set - that he had treasured. (I guess he went to Columbia for a year or two). She seemed to think I was the likely grandchild to appreciate it and I guess she was right; it still holds a place of pride on my bookshelves and I have used it in the past for research. And maybe I need to periodically pull a volume off now and dip into it for things to read....)
****
I searched on the poem title at first, and came up with too much stuff. Then I searched his name (At least the version he used in writing) with "poet" and I found it!
Apparently it was sold and used in advertisements:
I know it as "To the Steger" and I thought it was about the piano (there is a Steger manufacturer of pianos), but apparently it was stripped of its original (?) title for the ad.
I'm guessing he sold it because he needed money; from his memoirs it seems he ALWAYS needed money when he was a young man.
(A better version - the one I know - is here but you have to download it as a .pdf. I keep saying I should print one on good, heavy, archival paper and have it framed and put it up near my piano. I like this version better; it's more art-nouveu-y and I think my grandfather would have preferred its aesthetics; I know I do)
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