The Day The Poet Died

The day I received a scathing piece of responding mail from an editor of a literary magazine was the day I gave up poetry. I had eagerly sent a handful of my freshest and most ripe poetry only to be told my writing was “forced and boring” as well as “not noteworthy.” I didn’t pick up a pen like Emily Dickinson again.

Correction. It was the day I saw the editor’s image and read the poetry that was accepted that I gave up on poetry. The lady was in her thirties, with flat brown and hair scrawny arms. The poetry matched the disappointment. Here, I was expecting grandeur and beauty and I got things that would’ve been beaten up in high school.

And after that, I felt no drive to write with my best iambic beat and eccentric metaphor. The magazine in question was proof that the “underground society” of poets and writers would prefer vague poems where all lines are one or two words, most of them being adjectives and adjectives like “disorderly,” “chaotic,” “depressing,” “painful,” and other words to describe what I just read. Maybe that was the irony if not the beauty of the poem.

And, unfortunately for me, I began to see my writing the way the lady with a thin frame and thick glasses saw it: a grasping attempt at expressing thought on par with an angst filled freshman in high school. This makes it hard to write out love when the words, no matter what the semantics, are on the same level as, “It is you I love / It must’ve come from above / Oh! You bought me a dove / And found my missing glove / Yes, it is love.”

I long gave up any aspirations of being the next Shakespeare after actually reading my first Macbeth and Much Ado About nothing. But suddenly I was no longer even the next me. Everything was barely as good as what I once assumed it was.

And that could’ve been the end of that. I would’ve continued my life, had children, (hopefully) get married, and land in a nursing home, reminiscing on the times I wrote a poem a day. That is, until my memory goes. But muses, especially mine, aren’t happy when you decide the will isn’t there to scribble on scrap paper and you’ve suddenly taken an atheistic approach to their existence. Suddenly I found myself nearly failing all my college exams because I spent my class and free time writing away feverishly like I had the next Declaration of Independence in my hand (I now declare that my dorm room and surrounding facilities are now of their own independent state from the university and America). By the time I was able to take a break (and beg my professors for a retake on almost all of my midterms), I found myself a new collection of writing that took a hold of me and didn’t let go like I was a kidnapping victim. Yet this, somehow, was the catalyst to bring out a part of myself that hadn’t seen the light of day since my elementary school stories of talking pandas and missing puppies.

And as clichéd as it sounds, it was freeing to write out short stories. Blank verse, free verse, sonnet…how about short story verse? No one’s ever berated a little piece of prose for not being in sonnet form. Does this little baby need to rhyme? Not unless I’m obsessive compulsive about every seventh word rhyming with “understandable” or “orange.” This was something I wouldn’t have to think over and just do. Although, looking back on it, the fact that I had to think about what I’d write with poetry kind of makes me a bad poet, doesn’t it?

And it’s not like I’ve sworn off poetry forever. But these stories are mine. All mine. And hopefully they will never see the inside of tan envelopes or the greasy fingers of an elitist person with a Master’s in Ancient Roman literature. And that’s how I prefer it. I’ll send them on my own time and to whomever I like, and not for approval. I write for me and only me and that’s the end of that. And it makes me happy. But maybe I’ll send a poem or two consisting of only onomatopoeias just for good measure.