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I have had a love/hate relationship with poetry, made up of three parts hate and one part love, for the last thirty years when I first discovered it at the age of seven. I was rebelling against the rote memorization of multiplication tables that year, and I grabbed onto the perceived freedom of freeform poetry as my life preserver in a world that was soon to include a structured summer full of remedial math lessons.
It didn't take me long to realize that poetry comes in many shades of awful. A simple search for it on the Internet will dig up an abundance of truly painful schlock that involves some variation or other of tears, roses, the moon, and broken hearts – drippy entreaties borne out of some reaching desire to write a Poem rather than to express a coherent feeling or idea – but that same search will also occasionally tease out a piece of writing that grips your heart and brain with all of the volcanic force it has smashed into its pill-sized form. That one good bit is worth all the loathsome dreck, the three parts hate you had to wade through to find that delicious one part love.
For me, the writing of poetry goes the same way. I write it in fits and starts, often putting aside both the reading and the writing of it for months at a time before I find myself falling back into a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass or a volume of Anne Carson's poetry. And once again, I start scribbling lines onto the backs of receipts and the edges of envelopes. Most of those lines that occur to me in check out lines and on city streets are terrible, more terrible than I would like to admit, but it is worth the personal shame of bad writing for those moments when the right words find the page, or, in my case, the screen.
Why I choose to blog my poetry at Schmoetry -- a secondary weblog attached to my main website, Schmutzie.com -- rather than publish it elsewhere or enter it into contests is because it just feels natural for me to do so. My original reason for doing this a few years ago was to force my own hand. I had been hiding my poetry in notebooks under the bed for twenty-five years, and I knew that if I were to continue to write it, I had to become braver about sharing it and give it more substantial legs in order to continue to believe in it. Schmoetry was the answer.
My reason now for blogging my poetry is that I do not yet feel ready to hand it over into another's care. I know that this is not logical. The words remain mine no matter where they go, but I feel like their legs aren't yet strong enough. I will become a better poet, and I do not want to look back on the babies I sent out into the world and see that they are still babies. I want to send out whole animals.
My process for blogging poetry is completely based out of my intuition and, aside from the part where I publish it on the internet, it is identical to how I have always written poetry. It goes something like this:
- I get a feeling in my gut. Images form in my head. Phrases start to thrum through my mind. If the feeling, the pictures and the rhythm slip into pace together, I am ready to tap out a poem. This part of the process can take anywhere from five minutes to several months.
- I have to type up the poem rather quickly, because I can't think about it for too long. If I do, I am apt to drag out a thesaurus and belabor the point. This speedy word dump can be nerve-wracking, because I have to work out the simplest end to a meaning before either the feeling, pictures or rhythm fall out of line from each other. It is common for me to chew all the skin off my lower lip while I do this.
- Then, I walk away and do my best to pretend that I didn't just write the rough draft of a poem. I read blogs or write
