How The Sacred Lake of Poetry Can Bring Wisdom to Our Prose
I’m not a poet.
I voiced this denial multiple times in my life and with complete conviction. It’s the first thing I told Alyson Shelton when she invited me to contribute to her “Where I’m From” series, which will run its 200th poem this summer.
I’m not a poet.
The art of poetry lies at the end of an uphill path like a sacred glacial lake, mist-covered and deep with memory. Centuries of noble pines surround the lake to protect it from invaders like me who long to dip their ignorant toes in its wise waters only to disturb the fragile truth.
I’m not a poet.
I fear that my clumsy approach to poetry will make me laughable, so I must deny I’m on this path at all. Still, I’ve written and published what some might call lyrical essays, prose poems, and hybrids. Does that make me a liar, a poseur, or both?
Poetry has been in my life as long as I’ve been a reader. My parents gifted me poetic picture books that turned the low, gray skies of my youth into wide open Sahara spaces. Poetry nowadays is like a foreign language that I cannot speak yet somehow understand when I pay it enough attention. Reading poetry clears the murky mornings of my mind and mirrors the world into meaning.
I rely on poetry in my writing life, too. Whenever the weight of missing words pins me down, I turn to poetry for inspiration. Reading a few lines is often enough to get me going again. It’s like looking at the rain for help and seeing the answers arise in spontaneous puddles.
It’s only more recently, however, that I dare to write what I still have difficulty calling by its name. Can one write poetry when one isn’t a poet? Does one become a poet by writing poetry? I’m not that bold.
But I am that needy. As writers, we often don’t know where we will arrive when we start on our journey and discover our destination along the way. This is what makes writing so exhilarating to me: We don’t just describe our world; we create it. Yet the means by which we discover our stories influences what stories we’re able to find.
—> Read the rest of my essay “How The Sacred Lake of Poetry Can Bring Wisdom to Our Prose” on Brevity’s website.
