I don’t write much poetry, but whenever I do, it feels like the rest of my writing gets a kick from behind and starts moving in directions I wouldn’t have expected before. I think of poetry now as a sort of cousin to fiction writing, like parkour is to a marathon. To me, it’s a way to express things that you wouldn’t normally get to while running the marathon that is a novel. That being said, I scoffed at poetry for a long time. I thought it was just a different style of writing that only existed for artsy literary nerds. Not that I would have ever said that to anybody who’s into poetry. One person’s guilty pleasures are as sacrosanct as the next, but it was just that, a guilty pleasure that I thought anybody with any sense would be loathe to admit to participating in.

It changed for me at the very tail end of my college experience when I took a creative writing class. It had a required poetry section, and I was not happy with that. I just wanted to learn how to write stories, not spew random rhyming words onto a page that don’t make any real sense. What was even worse is that I had to read a poem in front of the class for a grade. Ugh. I wasn’t alone in that sentiment either. I could tell most everybody in the class was not looking forward to reading a poem aloud. The presentations were spread over several days, and I was on day two, which meant I got to watch several fellow students suffer through their own presentations before I could get mine over with. I just knew it was going to be torture. I even considered taking a B in the class just so I could skip the assignment. It occurred to me that it was a bit silly to get so worked up over it though. My logic was this: If I’m just reading a bunch of rhyming words I put on a page, why should I feel so bad about reading them to people? I didn’t actually believe the poem would say anything meaningful because that’s not what poems did in my view. And if it didn’t have any insight into anything, it wouldn’t reveal anything about how I thought or felt, so why feel bad about sharing it? Of course, this logic wasn’t very clear to me at the time. I just kinda got over my anxiety by saying “big deal” to myself over and over again.

So I got started on the poem. It was inspired by a musician named Deca who I had just started listening to at the time. Deca raps in a very structured flow, and the lyrics he fits into that structure call up powerful images and a vivid atmosphere. Try listening to his song Curiosity Shop if you want to know what I mean. I figured if I could learn a thing or two from this artist, then maybe this poem wouldn’t come off too poem-y, and it could be more like the lyrics I actually enjoy hearing (don’t ask me how poetry and rap were any different in my head, I honestly don’t know). But as I got into the poem, I realized I couldn’t quite pull off that strict structure and tight rhyming scheme that Deca is capable of. What I could try to mimic though, was his irreverent take on the trappings of modern society. I then came up with this line, which is the first line of the poem I titled Futurism.

“My boss says push the envelope but the address says Kaczynski”

Pretty dark, but also a little funny, isn’t it? The rest of the poem flowed from this line. It was mostly just an anxiety fueled rant full of slant rhymes and ugly phrasing. The thing was though, it actually did mean something. It wasn’t just artsy crap for the sake of being artsy. Moreover, I could never have written a story that encapsulated quite the same feeling as the poem did.

I looked back over it and thought, “Oh, I’ve written some poetry that actually means something to me.” I had a conception shattering moment where I wondered if I had just been needlessly mocking poets in my mind for years. My next immediate thought was, “Now I have to read this garbage in front of people and I can’t even convince myself it’s just words on a page. Fuck.”

Long story short, I forced myself to read the poem in front of a bunch of people, and the crazy thing was, everybody liked it. The professor told me the first line about Kaczynski put in a lot of work and that the rest was detailed and specific enough to make a real impact on him. Then the next person was up to read theirs, and that was that. Hardly as big a deal as my brain was making it out to be.

Since then I’ve thought about poetry much differently. I noticed that after writing a few more for the class, my normal writing improved drastically. The imagery was more powerful, the form more flowing, and most importantly, I could actually inject emotional baggage into a sentence without outright stating that there was supposed to be emotion tied to something. I think poetry forced me to write in a brand new way and helped me grow as a writer.

Long story short, I now believe most writers could benefit from writing a poem or two, and I like to flex my brain into a poetry shape whenever my writing starts to feel too stuffy and straight forward. Injecting a little art for art’s sake can really spice things up, and beyond that, maybe you’ll find that it’ll go beyond just being for art’s sake after all.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley