Valentine's Day Every Day

Letter to a Sad Poet

My Dear:

I can eliminate one source of unhappiness for you at once. Don't worry about how your poetry is received here. My collection slowly grew for years before breaking into the top tier at Wattpad (see the screenshot above), and then, owing to how Wattpad calculates rankings, only briefly. Rankings change every day. Keep at it and your day will come. I'm happy to have reached 7th place with this collection, remembering that is out of over 280,000 poetry books at Wattpad! Even to crack the top 1000 is to be in about the top 1/3 of 1 percent! You can do that!

     As for your stated wish to become a better poet, I understand your sorrow and your frustration on that score too. There are no easy answers in writing. All I can say is "Write the truth." And respect forms that have stood the rest of time. Don't be seduced by the notion you should say something "totally new," if just for novelty's sake. In music I prefer the timeless and classical to what is merely new. As Goethe said, "The old songs are the best," as they've survived. The same holds true for poetry, especially that which comes from the heart. Through the centuries the human heart and its inclinations have changed little.

       Regarding the sadness you poems express, the art of darkness fades quickly. Creating art offers something ennobling, or else it becomes just another job. Hunger for light and love, and express this hunger in your work, however often you think all you have to proclaim is "nothing new" or only sorrow and darkness.

       Your poetry is carefully crafted, and I get a full sense of you from it. But it pains me to find one yet so young with such a view of life, a foreshortened vision that leads you to that emotional darkness by which any of us can be seduced if we let it. That can become a self-reinforcing, small, but at least familiar place. You may think otherwise and think only expressions of sorrow are"worldly." In fact, such is not a true artist's vision, but the greatest of myopias.

       This is in no way a criticism of you. I admire both your sensitivity and your determination. Rather, I offer you, from my heart to yours, as one who has been through what you write of, a reminder, a suggestion, that there is a light our spirits may aspire to reach.

       Even if you are still enamored of the novel and the new, there is nothing older and more stale than the dour face of resignation. Darkness has that dangerous appeal I mentioned. But the price it extracts is a creative laziness that refuses to concede we are free to choose to remain in its shadow or, though our art, emerge from it.

       I understand the comfort of disillusion—it allows the conceit that we've reached a place others haven't dared to—and that despair is the artistic space you've chosen to cultivate. I read your poetry with that in mind.

       But I say to you as a friend to whom one may speak truth, that you're wrong, for the sake of your life and your sanity, literally so. Your poetry has shown me you are stronger than you think. Now seize that strength and rise to the heights your talent deserves.

       Bring not more darkness but more light to the world. Think less of yourself and more of what you can give your readers. That will make you not just a good poet, but a great one. 

Love,

Jim