Day 16: On Poetry

This week I’ve been having these long, looping conversations with friends. The kind where ideas turn over & over until they’re worn smooth.

We’ve been talking about poetry, or at least, what I’m calling poetry. The short notebook pieces I’ve been scribbling in my B7 hospital poems book. I don’t really know what I’m doing.

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With drawing, painting, film-I know. I can tell you when something sings. I can name a perfect shot, a great line in a song, the exact brushstroke where the whole thing comes alive. I can edit an essay until it’s lean and sharp.

But with poetry? How do you even know if it’s good? How do you cut and shape something when you can’t see where the edges are?

I asked Helen, who said: “Does it have to be edited? Isn’t poetry just poetry? That’s the point, no? If you don’t know what edits there are to do, maybe it doesn’t need editing?”

I keep thinking about that. How liberating it is to imagine that not everything requires fixing?

Not everything has to be finished into a final, gleaming thing. Sometimes you write because you have to. Because the words are pressing up against the inside of your ribs and the only way to breathe is to let them out.

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When I got sick, I learned that we all actually die. I mean, we *know* this - but really don’t really know it until you’re faced with it.

I realised that although each of us is special and unique, our pain and brokenness is not. Over time, I came to understand that the world is not indifferent or cruel, but precious and loving indeed, lovely. tilting ever toward good. Even when that’s super hard to find or feel at times.

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And so maybe poetry is not about the perfect line, or verse, or poem.

but about this:

to speak when you have something urgent in your chest, to capture the beauty of harshness of all things that make a life feel like living.

to set it down in the world, raw and unguarded,

and to let it live:

because one day you will not.

And maybe the bravest thing is to leave it there - - - -: still breathing.