Most years after I write a collection of thirty poems for National Poetry Month, I shut them away in a drawer and I never think of them again. This is pretty unfortunate -- not because you guys will never get to see such great work again or anything, but because I'm effectively robbing myself of much of the creative process. The raw material has been formed, and now it's just waiting for a delicate hand to shape it into something distinct and beautiful.
I won't lie to you, most of the poems I write in the month of April are just stinkers. They're half-formed ideas that I just threw up to meet the deadline, without much thought or car put into them. But who knows, maybe there's a seed in some of those that's been fertilized by all of the crap. And beyond that, there are actual poems that I really liked and, with nurturing, might even be worth submitting to a place or two later on down the road.
Writing poetry -- or anything at all -- isn't really worth the effort it takes if you're not going to see the process through. I have over a hundred poems written over the past four or five years that I've thrown up in various journals and subsequently forgotten about. It's time to dust them off, see what's worth pursuing, and see the projects through to their bitter end.
I still need a little bit of space from this most recent batch of poetry, so starting in June I'll look through the poems I wrote for last year's National Poetry Month and grab the twelve I like most. From there, I'll edit one a week, submit them to peer review, and eventually, start looking for places that might want to publish them. Hopefully by year's end there'll be at least one poem that's been published somewhere. Either online or in print. I'm not picky!
Another thing I've come to realize is that I have little patience for reading poetry. There are a number of factors for this -- a lot of poems written by people who are just starting out use words that are archaic and impressive-sounding for false inflation of their ideas. That is, they're making relative mundane statements and observations, but using lofty language to try and mask the fact. I don't know if it's my age or experience, but it's easy to see through and just immediately makes me want to bail on the work with no further effort.
By contrast, you have poetry from a lot of the 'establishment' that feels impenetrable without a Master's degree in the humanities. That's equally discouraging; I've got nothing against work that makes you think or something you can enjoy on multiple levels, and in fact the work of taking a poem apart is pretty rewarding. But I think too many people make poetry so dense there's no entry into it without specialized knowledge. It's difficult to be a 'casual' poetry fan.
Maybe I'm just reading all of the wrong people, but the result of this is that I'm just not reading poetry at all. And I think that's resulted in a degradation of my work. The areas of the brain that decipher metaphor and other poetic tricks are the same ones in play when you create poetry. And thinking of poetry as a realm of expression for people only interested in emotionally disconnect word-logic puzzles or emo kids with little to say makes your own work suffer. It's absolutely not true, but it's a hard stereotype to shake. When a part-time poet feels that way about his craft, you know the medium is in trouble.
So, what to do? The obvious answer is to read more poetry, put up with the chaff to get to the good stuff. I could brush off my old favorites -- Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, Charles Rafferty -- to remind me that it's possible for poetry to be emotionally rich and complex, yet accessible. Or I could ask the three friends I know who like poetry who they recommend. But maybe I could encourage a bit of discussion here.
So, what do you guys think? What poets would you recommend to reawaken interest in a disillusioned reader? Have any of you ever experienced poetry burn-out before? What did you do to get out of it?
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