“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
For my birthday this year, I went to the woods.
Okay, not the woods exactly. I drove on the interstate for about 45 minutes and pulled onto a gravel drive leading to an Airbnb aptly named “The Tiny Getaway” by its host. The parking spot was directly in front of a chicken coop. It wasn’t a farm, exactly, but it was about as close as I’d been to a farm-like place in years. It felt different, and that was enough.
I booked this solo trip for a number of reasons, though I’m not sure I knew what they were at first. I craved uninterrupted time in silence, and a forced separation from the daily to-do list I cling to at home. My brain operates like there’s a ping-pong ball in it, bouncing from anxiety about one task to anxiety about another at all times. In this state, there is no room to create. Only to do.
there is an irksome place between my shoulder blades whose natural state is tense. the muscles must be stretched like an elastic band and held there purposefully. when my heart rate elevates or the color rises in my face panic and anger both migrate to the irksome place. it is a part of me. I know there’s nowhere else for it all to go but through my back and past my spine into my heart. better that the feelings stay between my shoulder blades. - May 30, 2021
So, I went to the woods — to this tiny house nestled by a creek, with free-roaming chickens and a rooster that cock-a-doodle-dooed not in the morning but at seemingly random points throughout the afternoon and evening. Maybe that’s normal. (What do I know about chickens?) The house was large enough for one person to exist comfortably for a few days, with cozy nooks for lounging and dreamy lighting everywhere I looked. I fell in love with it the moment I opened the door.
I went with a pile of books, journals with different purposes, and a mission: to read about poetry, and think about where it fits in my life. And to think. And to be. I’ve spent the past year writing in short bursts, as thoughts and feelings about our collective-yet-isolating nightmare came to me. It didn’t occur to me until I’d already started publishing them that it might be poetry. My initial excitement at diving into a new form quickly turned to imposter syndrome. Having more or less abandoned any examination of poetry since high school, I hardly felt qualified to claim I was writing it.
And so, was I writing it? Or were these just unkempt groups of words masquerading as something more? And did I even want to write poetry, or be a “poet”? And if I did want that, did I have the skills? I wasn’t sure. In the past, I’ve felt proud that my writing style is straightforward and easily accessible to most people — traits rarely attributed to great poetry, so I thought.
I spent the first night reading The Hatred of Poetry, a thought-provoking essay by the poet and novelist Ben Lerner. Certainly, you could argue with Lerner’s foundational premise (and many have):
“Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical — the human world of violence and difference — and to reach the transcendent or divine … Poetry isn’t hard, it’s impossible.”
Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry
But what was important to me in reading his essay was that it made me examine my journey writing and reading poetry, and why I was doing it. Sometime in the haze of 2020, I started introspecting after a long hiatus of disconnection from myself, and from others. That introspection turned into pithy thoughts scribbled in my journal. And one day I had the thought that maybe some other people would connect with them. So I shared them. And then I started writing them in order to share them. And quickly, the inspiration ran out.
I’m not sure all poetry strives to reach the divine, but I am certain it must come from within. The moment I decided to crank out “poem” after poem and plaster it onto a pretty image for Instagram, the jig was up. That’s a hard but necessary realization for a lifelong people-pleaser. If I keep writing, it must be for me. Not for them — whoever “they” are.
I’m not so sure that I want to be a poet, or that I have the vocabulary for it, or that my brain works in such a way that I could write good poetry without painstaking effort I could put toward other endeavors. And that’s okay. Maybe pretty metaphors and exquisitely chosen words aren’t my thing. Maybe I just want to tell it like it is.
The desire to connect with others through the written word is strong for many writers, and arguably the reason many writers write at all. But it’s a fine line between hoping someone can relate to your experience and simply writing what others want to hear. Sharing your truth, rather than the “universal” one, might be the bravest act there is. In order to share my truth, I have to find it. After all this thinking, I decided my real reason for writing is to connect with myself.
It’s an ancient endeavor — to find the meaning of life, or at least of your life, or what life is in the first place, as Thoreau did. I’ll always struggle with how much of that inner world to divulge, and who might be impacted by what I say, and whether anyone will care. I don’t think those of us who write about our personal experiences ever get over that, really. The hope is to learn the song of yourself and find the bravery to reveal it. And with any luck, a line or two of your song overlaps with that of another, and in that overlap is the point.
Or maybe for you the point is something else. That’s for you to decide.
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
– Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
becca starkes 