Am I Poetic? What Makes Something Poetry?

There’s this quote by Kait Rokowski that reads: “Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.” This quote refers to poetry about war, or about tragedy, both of which there’s unfortunately plenty in the world to go around. But in my studies on what makes something poetry, I’ve likened myself to thinking that this refers to more than just blood. It refers to all poems. It refers to anything poetic.

There was this one semester last year that, when it started, I was not doing well. I’m fine now, by the way. I’m not the type of person to really like to talk about my hard times; I’m not much of a talk-about-myself person at all, really. But yeah, long story short, not a bright time. I’d been home all day on a Saturday, wallowing away or whatever, but I was getting restless. I look at the clock, it’s past midnight, and I think fuck it. I tie up my Docs, pull on a sweatshirt and overcoat, and go outside for a walk. I have no plan of where to go. It’s freezing cold, and dangerously late to be walking outside alone, not helped by the fact that music was blasting in my earbuds, so I wouldn’t be able to hear danger if it stampeded behind me. But I just needed to move, and no one was around to tell me not to. So I went.

I ended up walking for a little over an hour until I ended up downtown. It was frigid, but it was also a weekend night, so there were dozens of groups of people downtown, in strapping dresses or casual tees, kept warm by the company that surrounds them and, more likely, the alcohol they’ve consumed. They say there’s no better place to be lonely than a city, and downtown is as close to a city as it gets in Blacksburg, my college town. I’m watching these groups of people as I stride past in my black hood and too-large jacket and I feel my heart hurt. I was doing this to myself, I knew, putting myself through pain in a way that was so far from safe, but I couldn’t help but be a little proud of this sojourn.

This was the kind of aesthetic that I always idealized for myself back in high school: A rugged, lonely writer, who wears too large coats and smokes cigarettes, who lies in a dim room by himself with sore wrists from writing and writing until he feels as though he’ll lose his fingers or his mind. This was the sort of person who would wander downtown sulking on his own in the middle of the night and muse to himself about how sad and different he was. By doing this, I felt as though I was doing something poetic, and by doing something poetic, I thought I was somehow becoming the person I wanted to be.

But now that I look back on this whole event, it feels less and less poetic. It feels like something that just happened. There are a trillion metaphors I could use to describe the weight in my chest and the turmoil within my head in those moments, but what happened was not the poetic metaphors. It was merely walking, and being sad, and being hopeful that I could turn the experience into pretty prose; that was all there was. The metaphors come later, what happens at the moment is simply what happens, and nothing else. Nothing greater. All that loneliness was never once beautiful. It just hurt.

I’ve always struggled with poetry because there was such a varied structure. Poetry is older than writing, and there are so many mediums that could be poetry that I often feel as though I have no idea where to start. But writing is my first true love, and my consistent hookup-rebound, and so I always start there. I have this feeling inside me, and I write words that, in the corners of my memory, make me feel that way. Lonely, introspective. Hopeful. I think I will always be a prose person before I am ever a poet, but honestly, how much can two things appear to overlap before they start to become one and the same?

I’m one of those writers who carries around a journal wherever they go. In highschool, it was this beautiful leather-bound book, in which I’d write in the appropriately-aesthetic cursive. At college, I’ve found it far easier to go without the physical book and just use my notes app. I’ll see something that fascinates me, or hear a quote, or even just live through an experience, and I’ll think oh, yes, write that down, I need to make a character who’s not me experience that in writing, so other people can understand it. And isn’t that what turns people into poets, wanting to say something that they frustratingly can’t just say? How much emotion can one fit into “The Star-Spangled Banner”, or into “The Starry Night”? What, that’s beautiful, isn’t poetry?

There’s a lot of structure, verse, and cleverness hidden subtextually in the art of poetry, but if you were to ask me point blank, after all of this, “What makes something poetry?” I would answer: “Something that conveys.” There may not be anything intrinsically poetic about a moment, or about an emotion, but something poetic can be created when one chooses to convey it some other way, so that other people can understand it.

A thousand different ways to say “it is what it is.” A million different others say “it is what it could be.” I think poetry is just saying “it is what we make it.” I’ll write poetry about me being lonely, or insecure, or whatever, and in that way I’ll turn it beautiful, or I’ll turn it poetic. I’ll note down the way my tea cup is stained from dozens of brews, or how the sunrise glints through the glass of my bus stop. I’ll note the way there’s a bird taking a bath in a pothole puddle, and the way my body feels fuzzy in overstimulation sometimes. And in doing that, I’ll turn it into poetry.

In that way, I am poetic. And anyone else is or can be too, as long as we turn ourselves into poetry. The good news is that human beings are pretty good at turning the mundane into art, as centuries of history have shown us. From the bright lights of the hospital room to the words etched into a gravestone, our lives are poetic because we choose to see it that way.

I hope this and anything else I’ve ever said makes sense. It’s late, I’m very caffeinated, and life is so colorful.

Photo credits are from: Wollertz | Dreamstime.com