When I say that I hate poetry, it is seldom, and I mean never ever, a reflection of the poets
who have brought lives to life,
who have allowed their brightness and darkness and everything in between and untold
to become something almost magical.
From nothing, something came.
Godly, if you ask me.
But no.
To be a poet.
You must live.
You must experience.
You must diversify your humanity constantly.
It is a perennially spent art form.
You can practise it, become technical, follow well-tested techniques.
But to be the poet that you exist as,
it draws so much from the well of life.
A well that I hate taking a plunge into.
It requires a life.
It requires living.
The part that I despise the most about everything.
—
Living is extraction.
It is not inspiration.
It is requisition.
It wants your mornings before you have language.
It wants your failures while they are still warm.
It wants the moments you tried to keep unremarkable
so they would not follow you home.
Poetry does not knock.
It inventories.
And everyone calls this bravery.
Everyone calls this depth.
Everyone calls this devotion to the craft.
But devotion implies choice.
No one asks whether the well consents.
—
I know what poetry makes possible.
I am not ignorant of the yield.
I have seen grief translated into architecture.
I have seen love survive its own extinction through line breaks.
This is not envy.
This is not bitterness.
This is refusal.
Because I know the exchange rate.
Because I know the cost is not paid once.
Because living does not end when the poem does.
The poem rests.
The body does not.
—
You say: live fully.
You say: write honestly.
But living fully is not neutral.
It is exposure.
It is staying long enough for damage to finish its sentence.
You say: this is where the material comes from.
I say: that is exactly the problem.
—
Some days I want poetry without biography.
Language without requisition.
Meaning that does not require me
to keep reopening rooms I have already exited correctly.
But poetry insists on provenance.
It asks where this came from.
It asks what it cost.
And if I answer honestly,
the answer is always: more.
—
There are two voices here.
One says:
This is the only way anything true survives.
The other says:
Survival is not a synonym for worth.
They do not reconcile.
They do not take turns.
They talk over each other
until the page becomes the only thing holding them apart.
—
If I hate poetry,
it is because it is never satisfied with theory.
It wants embodiment.
It wants proof.
It wants me living
when I am tired of being available to experience at all.
And still...
Or
When I say that I hate poetry, it is seldom, and I mean never ever, a reflection of the poets
who have brought lives to life,
who have allowed their brightness and darkness and everything in between and untold
to become something almost magical.
From nothing, something came.
Godly, if you ask me.
But no.
To be a poet.
You must live.
You must experience.
You must diversify your humanity constantly.
It is a perennially spent art form.
You can practise it, become technical, follow well-tested techniques.
But to be the poet that you exist as,
it draws so much from the well of life.
A well that I hate taking a plunge into.
It requires a life.
It requires living.
The part that I despise the most about everything.
Poetry does not ask gently.
It does not accept substitutes.
It wants the days you avoided,
the rooms you left early,
the conversations you did not survive intact.
And I resent that hunger.
Because I know what it produces.
Because I have seen what it makes possible.
Because I know that what I withhold
is exactly what it wants.
And to be honest,
I and poetry are the same,
We both want more than we are sometimes able to give.
I fear poetry.
I fear,
me.
