The Joy of Poetry ... Right?

If you were to look within the pages of my tatty teen notebooks, you would find between trivial diary entries about boys and bullying - very sad poems. Poetry only fell from me in the dark days. Troubling days at school would lead to tear-stained pages filled with verses detailing pain and shame, names and rain. Days lost, broken trust, but my heart must … etc. You get the gist, I was crying and trying to transfer sadness from the pit of my stomach to the lines on a page.

On sunny days, days filled with water balloon fights in summer and hot kisses that made me ache on crusty cinema seats, my notebook lay empty beneath my mattress. Not only because I didn’t equate writing poetry with joy, but because I didn’t know how to write joy. So I stuck to pulling out my phone notes when I felt miserable and felt swift relief reading back my heartbreak, thinking maybe it would all be worth it in some way.

Years later, I was on a mission to be a better poet, and like any 18-year-old soft gal that lusts after soft boys, I started with Bukowski, that’s it, I thought, pain, more pain! I must live the poetry I cannot yet write (no seriously, I wanted that phrase as a tattoo for many years) and dove into terrifying, sad, and boundary-breaking experiences. I mean, we all know that great art comes from great heartbreak, I learned this from the greats. The poetry around me was dark, love poetry was a thing of the past, antiquated, Shakespearean, and quite boring. What sold was sadness, so in order to become a better writer, I genuinely felt that extreme experiences were the only way to go.

I fell into bad bars, bad drinking habits, lousy boys’ beds, all the while feeling ever so much that I was in an episode of GIRLS, certain I’d look back one day and chuckle, my poetry collection tucked beneath my arm. And I did have quite an excellent time, but seriously, it was exhausting, exhausting to keep sadness at the top of my throat ready to be divulged at any moment in the name of poetic growth. (No seriously I was that pretentious) and perhaps this self-exploitation is foolish, but it’s not uncommon. Nietzsche spoke of the poets’ life saying ‘Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.’ He’s not wrong, and I am not insulted (come at me again Neitzsche I dare you ) as writers we must be shameless with our sharing, our offering to the world, finding therapy in transferring thought to page is beautiful, and we should be open to this, but at what cost? How often? And what happens when all we can do is write incredibly sad poems?

Upon Googling ‘writing sad poetry’, I am met with a swathe of message board entries -‘I can only write sad songs’, ‘Why do I work better when I’m sad?’, ‘Why am I only able to write when sad?’ are just a few. We can’t all be trapped in a sad loop can we? Are we writing only sad poems because we only see sad poems? Surely not.

In an article from Australasian Science, Forgas writes ‘mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative, and ultimately more successful communication style’. I mean sure, makes sense, it is often when we are in a dark mossy pit that we reach for exterior understanding in the form of a piece of art; a painting, a poem, a song, a book, so perhaps it is a learned behaviour from overexposure, sad = good? Sad = published? Sad=monetised emotion?

A sad=good piece of art is not only a sweet little cash cow for some, it is the connective tissue that binds humans together in understanding, it allows for downward comparison - the ‘wow well at least I don’t feel like that’. It is a stark reminder of the shared pain of existence, and there is no shame in persistently writing this pain. It is a menthol balm to the soul, we are surrounded by the balm, wading through claggy balm!

Everywhere I look online, people are sharing their trauma, and look, don’t get me wrong, I adore people sharing, I LIVE for people being open and honest and not locking their pain inside like a plastic ballerina in a jewelry box, but sometimes, I find myself reaching inside my body, like a magicians hat, attempting to pull some sadness from myself to mold, to glaze, a shiny offering. And sometimes I don’t want to have to share my trauma to be published or heard, and I don’t think anyone else should have to either. Instagram may be a highlight reel in which people only share their joy, but sometimes I feel like the creative landscape begs for our pain in order to get clicks, and I beg of you, and I beg of myself - consider joy.

Easier said than done I know. When I attempted to write my first love poem I was stumped. I am miraculously, horrendously in love, but translating it onto the page felt cliched and extremely difficult. I was only used to writing poems about bad men, bad times, bad bars. I had become seasoned in my pain, and almost afraid of confronting my own happiness, it felt lame to share, boasting and self-satisfying, even BORING! But it’s not! Consider these beautiful poems:

HAVING A COKE WITH YOU - FRANK O’ HARA

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
                                                                                                              I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
                               it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance - Ada Limón 

Sometimes, I think you get the worst
of me. The much-loved loose forest-green
sweatpants, the long bra-less days, hair
knotted and uncivilized, a shadowed brow
where the devilish thoughts do their hoofed
dance on the brain. I’d like to say this means
I love you, the stained white cotton T-shirt,
the tears, pistachio shells, the mess of orange
peels on my desk, but it’s different than that.
I move in this house with you, the way I move
in my mind, unencumbered by beauty’s cage.
I do like I do in the tall grass, more animal-me
than much else. I’m wrong, it is that I love you,
but it’s more that when you say it back, lights
out, a cold wind through curtains, for maybe
the first time in my life, I believe it.

West Wind #2 - Mary Oliver

You are young. So you know everything. You leap
into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me.
Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and
your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to
me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent
penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a
dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile
away and still out of sight, the churn of the water
as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the
sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable
pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth
and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls
plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life
toward it.

I Feel Drunk All The Time - Kenneth Patchen

Jesus, it’s beautiful!
Great mother of big apples, it is a pretty
World!

You’re a bastard, Mr. Death,
And I wish you didn’t have no look-in here.

I don’t know how the rest of you feel,
But I feel drunk all the time

And I wish to hell we didn’t have to die.

Oh, you’re a nervy bastard, Mr. Death,
And I wish you didn’t have no hand in this game

Because it’s too damn beautiful for anybody to die.

The Thing Is

BY ELLEN BASS

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

There’s beauty in this life yet, my friends.

But how do we translate this beauty onto a page? Well, IMHO - we must be idle, we must live, keep our eyes open. In order to live a life of poetry, we must be able to transform not only the darkness into light but the light into a kaleidoscope, the banal into beauty, a mundane life into a blockbuster. We must notice the way her eyes light up at the sight of a dog awaiting its owner outside Sainsbury’s, the way his foot taps along to a new song, the delicious bitterness of over-brewed tea, we must pocket that as a metaphor for life, how it still feels so good after all this time. We must notice the smell of tarmac, how it reminds us of an idle Tuesday in which we ate a sandwich outside the school gates with Danielle, the way she walked home in the sunshine, unaware of how August would stretch like a steam train.

Most importantly we must remember, that this life is for the taking, and our recording of each painful and sweet moment will last, far beyond us, so let us distill each passing minute, and watch our offering float in the air like ash in a gentle breeze, light and dark, constantly evolving.

Enjoy the ride, and carry your notebook with you, just in case.

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