What I Wish I’d Known About Poetry

Alex Creece, Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth

I wish I’d known that poetry is punk as fuck. We ought to read it widely and wildly.

My first exposure to poetry was through the regional public school system, which offered a meagre selection of traditional British and Anglo poetry (with its often-stiff forms and colonial gaze). It wasn’t until university that I realised poetry is a space where some of the most sublime, courageous and honest writing is happening. I came to poetry with preconceived notions—perceiving it as something reserved for people who are conventionally ‘smart’ and well-composed (while I am not). But really, poetry can look like anything; it can be whatever you make it. I wish I’d known that poetry, perhaps more than any other genre, is for the people. It’s as varied as we are.

I’ve also learned that poetry’s biggest fans are usually fellow poets. Even our writer friends who are novelists or memoirists may be lukewarm at best when it comes to poetry, so we need to make the extra effort to be community-minded and show up for each other. Buy and borrow poetry books; attend reading events; pass along the dog-eared zines, mags and DIY pamphlets; lend each other our time and care.

I wish I’d truly known poetry sooner, that it had been part of my life earlier, as it is such a prolific way to play and emote and thrash.

Dakota Feirer, Arsenic Flower

Turns out that my dad didn’t disown me once he discovered I chose poetry. I’d eventually learn that poetry does not compromise an already ill-defined masculinity. Rather, it is a way back, and would allow me to tell my dad I love him again. I eventually learned that Tupac Shakur was a poet. That the page is not the container of poetry, but one of the windows for coming to know it. That it exists in landscapes and our bodies, and is the stuff of ceremony. That I don’t owe dead poets a damn thing. And I don’t subscribe to their rules. I specifically mean the Eliots, the Poes and the Frosts; those grandparents of classical poetry–albeit capturing popular imaginaries–didn’t have me in mind when they wrote their defining works. As far as I’m concerned, there are no rules.

Evelyn Araluen, The Rot

It doesn’t have to rhyme. No matter what you were told in primary school or what your mum says when she gives your book a puzzled frown. It doesn’t need to rhyme, it doesn’t need to drip with syrupy analogies or feel gritty in your teeth like you just bit down on a cigarette. Poetry doesn’t have to do much; it can sit heavy and awkward in a doorway to let the breeze through or be a knick-knack you keep on the shelf. Its uselessness is the point, but you won’t feel clever saying that when you try to explain what you do to your hairdresser or when you hover over the blank space of your next line. You won’t remember choosing this. You will remember a cadence that reorganises your tongue or an image that presses between your shoulder blades. You will remember the light that met you one quiet afternoon by the month you spent filtering through analogies in search of the one that feels as warm as the first spring breeze. You’ll forget how to answer a question straight or how to write a sentence without mentioning the moon. You’ll tire of pretty things and ordinary speech. You’ll come back to your memories just to stand in a different corner of the room. Some poems aren’t meant to be finished. Some were written before you ever started, like that light, that afternoon.

Anne-Marie Te Whiu, Mettle

Why didn’t anyone tell me that poetry is like the wind? Sometimes it has been a reckless, unpredictable gale force that’s knocked me off my feet, and other times she’s been a gorgeous, soft breeze that has reassured, inspired and comforted me. My relationship with poetry has thankfully blown me in the direction of community, belonging and solidarity. Poetic communities are spaces where I can be generative and give back. The more I write, edit and produce poetry, the more I know myself and my tupuna (ancestors). Perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned thus far is a harsh reality—without a deadline, the poem doesn’t get written.

Ender Başkan, Two Hundred Million Musketeers

Be prepared for the poem to arrive at any time and in any form.

You might be in the shower, on a walk or lying under a tree.

Grab hold of the thread.

It might just be a word or a phrase, and the bigger the idea, the harder it is, so don’t think big yet, just pull the thread.

Remember you are not working yet, you are playing.

Record/write it out without wondering if it’s good or not.

It helps a lot to turn off your critical mind until the end.

I like to think of the poem as the finished item, say a piece of clothing. And the words as material. In the beginning you are making material, making fabric. You have to focus on that first, and then later you cut it, you tailor it, you give it shape, you make a piece of clothing, a dress, a shirt, a hat, ie, a poem.

Tim Loveday, ‘[TRAILER] Mission [masculine]: Impossible’

‘You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles…’

‘If music be the food of love, play on…’

‘Do not go gentle into that good night…’

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty: that is all…’

Poets are notorious for giving advice, much of it far too shonky to build a house with, let alone a career. That’s the gift of poetry: it says look here while it performs some sleight-of-hand off screen; therein the humble home of your childhood performs the darling weight that crushes the evil witch terrorising your adult self. Poetry comes back in another form, more vivid and realised in each iteration. It has the capacity to vanquish and illuminate in equal measure, but you must (you must!) commit breath to it. If you’re looking for a simple aphorism or neatly packaged truth—forget it. Good poetry demands a reread, attention. Deep time. Don’t try to read it all—or even understand everything you’re reading—just let that which sits with you, sit with you. Choose your friends, your comrades, your elevator acquaintances, and buckle in. Don’t read it all—the legacy is too rich, the library too vast. Just read a bit, here and there. And occasionally challenge yourself (read something you wouldn’t usually). Meanwhile, always ask these two precious questions: what the hell is this poet doing? Do they even know? The answer is probably not—poems are usually written in total retrospect. Poetry, like writing, is reconstituted, reimagined. The trick is to appear as immediate as possible.

What then can we take from a poet, except word trickery and a temporal shift? Well, precisely that: the trick applied to the self—the chance to go back in time, inhabit the inner-child and truly play. Too often emerging poets try to write the worst things that ever happened to them. I should know; I’ve written enough ‘gloomy father poems’ to push me from the arena of ‘daddy issues’ into the stadium of ‘daddy obsessive’. You know what it hasn’t given me? Money nor joy (okay, it gave me a voice). I wish I’d spent a lot more time doing what wasn’t on my mind—writing out elsewhere. It’s advice I often give (and struggle to apply): don’t ever write about sex, death, life, the universe, misery, God or your father—they’ll rock up in the work anyway. They’re always there, just like a good poem that begs for a rereading.

Thabani Tshuma, The Gospel of Unmade Creation

On the craft side, it’s how we can create our own canon. Like many, my first introduction to poetry was the ‘classics’ and a lot of work framed through an institutional/academic lens. It can be a turn-off and was the reason I spent many years lamenting that ‘I just don’t get poetry’. Spoken word helped crack that shell wide open for me and created avenues where poetry could defy preconceived limits of language, performance and practice. It’s not reserved for a select few. We get to define and evolve what poetry is and can be.

On a soul level, I wish I’d known poetry’s capacity for alchemy. I think it truly is the stuff of magic. To bear the moniker of ‘poet’ is to wield the power to reshape reality. It’s kind of cheesy, but once we know that and accept it fully, we can do some really incredible things (or at least begin to).

Maria van Neerven, Two Tongues 

Growing up there was only English old white male poets.

They wrote in a language too difficult for me to understand, left me feeling unintelligent.

Like tennis back then, all dressed in white; expensive, unapproachable, not for blak kids that for sure.

Poetry found me later in life. I was surprised and overwhelmed; to read and explore other poets opened my mind.

It is joyous, it is freeing to know poetry can be relatable, honest and human. Poetry lives in all of us; it is wonderful.

That is ‘What I wish I’d Known About Poetry’.

Panda Wong, angel wings dumpster fire 

John Kinsella, Ghost of Myself

Having just had the disturbing experience of reading a poem by ‘me’ that wasn’t by me—a poem that was a ChatGPT construction presented as being composed by me—I would say that I wish I’d known that one’s ‘voice’ could be so easily stolen and reinvented for spurious purposes. ChatGPT might not have the agency some humans wish it to have, but it does have the expectation of agency built into its sales pitch. It’s sold as a tool when it is actually a manipulator and abuser of knowledge. It serves the market algorithm and its designers’ profit-based desires. It is destructive in so many ways. Many individuals and often whole communities have experienced much worse misrepresentation in many different contexts and ways, of course, and that has been the methodology of colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism in its many guises. I don’t claim such a loss on a personal or communal level, but I do object to it on a politically representative level. It damages a cause.

I wish I had known that what I always felt was the basis for my processing the world, poetry, was at risk of being taken and repackaged to serve what even at a young age I would have considered wrong. On the one hand, I suppose it’s a perverse ‘validation’ of poetry—the creators of AI, obsessed with a desire for a creativity separate from them but ultimately directed by them; a desire to create poetry so obsessive that it can exemplify the exploitation and dishonesty of the capitalist endgame.

The poem I allude to was used in a recent article that was illustrated with poetry extracts by various people. I wrote to the author of the article asking where they’d found the poem purportedly by me and ChatGPT turned out to be its source. The poem did contain a few words amounting to an ‘expression’ of mine which had been neatly re-packaged in four-line stanzas in an approximation of my style but said the opposite of what I would think or write. It was a clever forgery on the surface and a completely wrong forgery in terms of intent. My politics were altered (flipped, really) as much as the language usage and syntax were contrived. I ask myself if it’s a case of the unreliable source or the source that bends ethics and meaning to ‘its’ (capitalist) will?

The problem of text altered to change meaning goes back much earlier for me. Editing can so easily be a destructive act. In the analogue world as much as the digital. Almost thirty years ago in a pre-recorded TV program I had a statement about writing poetry of land that was cut, changing meaning. It was supposed to be yoked with a statement about the fact that there are things I cannot speak of because I do not have that right, but that bit was left on the editor’s floor. A very specific act of politically altering context to suit a vision that was not mine. Not knowing it might happen was naive on my part.

It’s incredible how no matter what you feel language will do in a poem to direct itself (and create its own meanings out of ambiguity and despite ambiguity), a statement by an author might direct the way it is read. An edited statement will direct or redirect as well. When that statement has been messed with, a different intent and ‘meaning’ attaches itself like rotten discourse or propaganda.

I wish I’d known all this when I started publishing poetry—I would have been more wary and maybe even written in a different way. But I am aware now, and grow more aware by the day, and my poems are given their own voice even when they are at their most rhetorical to find a way through to their own truths, their own evocations of language as a challenge to received thinking.

But hold on, no, ChatGPT has invented a new me I don’t recognise and will never accept or even acknowledge. And as a corollary to all this, I would add that how we receive a poem so very much affects how we read it. I read Ezra Pound at a young age and became entangled in his cantos, only slowly unravelling their bigotries to the point of rejection. But I had been ‘sold’ on their modernist necessity. They turned out to be very different in intent from what I was ‘told’, and how I was told to receive them. So it’s not only the manipulation of what we write that I wish I’d known about but also about how we are presented with what to read and how we access it. No matter what the poem, question its origins, context and purpose.

MORE

• Writing Memoir through Poetry course by Sarah M Saleh (KYD Members get 10% off courses year-round)
• Poetry Says podcast, hosted by Alice Allan
• ‘Killing the poets: Reading Mahmoud Darwish in wartime’ by Jumaana Abdu, Griffith Review
• Poetry Unbound Substack by Pádraig Ó Tuama
• ‘The Poet in the Public Arena’ by Sarah Holland-Batt, Sydney Review of Books
• ‘Poetry can already be free’ by Ender Başkan, Overland
• Cordite Issue 15: Precarious, edited by Andy Jackson