Thoughts on Poetry Part 1

Years later, when I look back at my time here in Cambridge, I'll remember it as one that was filled with poetry. I think I always wanted to be a poet. I remember a couple of poems I wrote as a kid called "Goat Coat" and "Price-Tag Bag" (see how clever? Those words rhyme!). And then I cranked out a lot of lyrics for punk/folk songs over the years, and finally threw in a couple of week-long summer workshops at the University of Iowa. But it's sort of like I've been circling around poetry without ever taking the full plunge. But I did this year. One of my four classes this semester was a poetry workshop, but psychologically it often felt like it was well over half of my entire workload--probably because I enjoyed it the most.

So what is it about poetry?

Well, for one, it's nice to birth new things into the world. That's what my poetry professor said one day when we were sitting in front of some of our new poems--that these were brand new to the world.

I like that. Maybe it's only marks on a sheet of paper, maybe no one but a few people will ever read it, but you've just added something to the world that didn't exist before. Reading literature is great, taking a philosophy course is fine, but in those endeavors you fill up your mind with someone else's stuff. When you write poetry, your only task to bring something new into the world. Not a bad thing at all.